Bitwise Raises Bitcoin (BTC) Price Target to $1.6 Million by 2036

Bitwise's Revised 2036 Assumptions

Bitwise Asset Management lifted its 10-year target for the Bitcoin (BTC) price to $1.6 million by 2036, up from $1.3 million, in the long-term capital market assumptions the firm published on Wednesday, 2026-10-28. The updated research document frames the revision as a re-rating of Bitcoin's addressable markets rather than a reaction to recent trading, and it arrives with a projected compound annual growth rate of 34.3% across the period. That rate runs roughly five times the 6.7% average annual return Bitwise expects from US equities on the same horizon. The target is built from the bottom up. Bitwise estimates how large each market where Bitcoin (BTC) could compete will be in 2036, then applies the share it expects the asset to hold in each, and lets the resulting stock and flow of capital set the terminal price. In the base case, that arithmetic lands at $1.6 million, a figure the firm presents as its central scenario rather than a ceiling or a floor. The revision lifts the base case by roughly 23%, a step that reflects larger market-size estimates rather than a changed view of Bitcoin's eventual share. The framework is the kind institutional allocators use to set policy weights, and Bitwise publishes it for clients weighing multi-year exposure, commonly through a regulated spot ETF. Committing at that horizon also demands the holding discipline the market shorthand calls HODL, since decade-out targets tolerate deep drawdowns on the way, and Bitwise did not publish an interim-year path alongside the 2036 endpoint.

Sizing explains most of the move. Bitwise raised its estimate of the global store-of-value market in 2036 to $110 trillion, from $91 trillion, and its estimate of the institutional investment market to $303 trillion, from $216 trillion. In the firm's framework, the store-of-value market is the pool of capital parked in assets investors use to preserve wealth across long periods, while the institutional market is the narrower pool of professionally managed money. Institutional investors currently manage about $147 trillion in assets, and the report calculates that directing 1% to 5% of that pool into Bitcoin (BTC) over the coming decade would create as much as $7.4 trillion of new demand. Each percentage point of institutional allocation maps to roughly $1.47 trillion of potential inflow. Both upward revisions enlarge the denominator Bitcoin draws from, which mechanically supports a higher terminal price even before share assumptions change. Supply adds little on its own, since crypto mining issuance is fixed by the Bitcoin halving schedule, so marginal demand meets a largely static float. Bitwise also prices the paths around its base case: the bear scenario assumes Bitcoin secures only 2.5% of the store-of-value market and sits at $130,686 in 2036, while the bull case assumes a 50% share and a price of $3.67 million. The spread between those endpoints is wide enough that the document is really publishing a distribution, not a point forecast.

Our read: the upgrade is a market-size story before it is a price call. Both inputs that moved the target, the $110 trillion store-of-value pool and the $303 trillion institutional market, sit a decade out, and the 1% to 5% allocation band is framed as a possibility, not a flow already underway. Demand on that scale would also outweigh the accumulation capacity of any single crypto whale, which is why the report is written for allocators rather than traders; readers tracking nearer-term levels will find those in our Bitcoin technical analysis. The figure joins other long-horizon marks published this quarter, including a post-FOMC scenario targets $873,000 by 2027 built on AI-assisted modeling, and the two differ by close to half; further coverage of decade-out calls sits in our long-term Bitcoin coverage. Bitwise states the $1.6 million target without fixing the spot level it starts from, so the implied multiple cannot be computed from the document itself.