Strive CEO Matt Cole Sees Bitcoin (BTC) at $500,000 by 2030

A 50% Compounding Path to 2030

Matt Cole, chief executive of the US asset manager Strive, has put a $500,000 target on Bitcoin (BTC) by the end of 2030, a call he built on compounding rather than cycle timing. Speaking on the What Bitcoin Did podcast, Cole argued that a compound annual growth rate of roughly 50%, sustained from today's level near $86,000, would lift the Bitcoin price to about six times its current value by the close of the decade. The driving force, in his telling, is fiscal: rising US national debt, growing government intervention in the Treasury market and a weakening dollar together set up what he expects to be a far stronger bull market than the last one, which he described as a disappointment because it failed to make new highs against gold. “The next bull market will be much more powerful than the previous cycle, which left investors disappointed by failing to make new highs against gold,” Cole said. His downside scenario has changed shape too. Instead of the 80% collapses that defined earlier eras, Cole expects a super cycle in which corrections stay within the 30% to 50% band, because institutional capital arriving through regulated ETF products now cushions the floor. He added that the four-year cadence tied to the halving is steadily losing influence as that persistent bid settles in, and his advice amounts to a HODL discipline: measure the position by cumulative compounding rather than by short-term volatility. At a steady 50% pace, the target needs no blow-off top to be reached, which is how he distinguishes the period ahead from prior cycles. On the macro side, Cole argued that productivity gains from artificial intelligence adoption, however large, will fall short of what is needed to service the US debt burden, leaving the government little choice but to dilute its liabilities by debasing the currency. Bitcoin (BTC), which carries no debt of its own, is positioned in his view to absorb the value that flees fiat as that trade-off plays out.

Strive's 27,462 BTC Stack

The forecast carries more weight than an ordinary commentator's number because Cole runs a balance sheet built on the same trade. Strive holds 27,462 BTC, the sixth-largest Bitcoin treasury among publicly listed companies worldwide, according to Coinreaders. The firm's structure is built to amplify exposure rather than simply store it: through preferred share issuance, Strive gives its common shareholders a leveraged route into Bitcoin's performance, an arrangement that binds the company's equity returns directly to the asset its chief executive is talking up. The alignment cuts in both directions. At Cole's own target, the 27,462 BTC stack would sit at more than six times its current notional value; in an old-style 80% drawdown, the leveraged share classes would feel the loss first. Market attention has now settled on a single question raised by the forecast: whether a sustained run of near-50% annual growth, backed by the institutional bid Cole expects to keep building, can carry the asset from roughly $86,000 to the 2030 mark. His answer rests on two structural claims. The first is that institutional accumulation has changed the market's anatomy, replacing the violent 80% drawdowns that once flushed out leveraged holders with shallower corrections in the 30% to 50% range. The second is that the four-year rhythm historically governed by the halving schedule is fading as a driver, its influence diluted by a continuous institutional bid that no longer waits on the supply calendar. From those claims follows his practical counsel: investors should compound through the swings rather than trade them.

For our desk, the load-bearing number is not $500,000 but the growth rate underneath it. Compounding roughly 50% a year across the four-plus years to the end of 2030 turns $86,000 into more than half a million dollars, so Cole's target is internally consistent with the rate he actually stated, even though no prior cycle has delivered a straight line like that. His shallower-correction premise also has support beyond his own book: commentator Lark Davis has already traced a cycle in which the drawdown stopped near 50% rather than ending in the historical 80% wipeout. The institutional bid, meanwhile, has not been continuous; our recent coverage of spot ETF outflows recorded the worst outflow week since June. Readers weighing the long horizon against entry timing can follow our Bitcoin technical analysis or the Bitcoin Rainbow Chart guide. The call itself is Cole's, and it stands or falls with the fiscal arithmetic he laid out: currency dilution as the default answer to the US debt stack.