Bitwise Asset Management expects bitcoin to deliver roughly five times the annual return of US stocks through 2036. The firm's new 10-year outlook, published Wednesday, projects bitcoin compounding at 34.3% per year against 6.7% for US equities, and raises its bitcoin price target to $1.6 million from $1.3 million.

The equities figure is an average of long-term forecasts from JPMorgan, PGIM, BlackRock and Vanguard, and appears in Bitwise's 2027 Bitcoin Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions. Long-term capital market assumptions are the decade-horizon estimates of return, volatility and correlation that asset managers publish to guide portfolio construction, so placing bitcoin in the same table as equities and private equity benchmarks it against the traditional building blocks of institutional portfolios. Private equity, the next-best-performing asset in that table, is assigned 10.8%. The table ranks bitcoin as both the highest-performing and the most volatile major asset. The forecast is anchored to bitcoin's price of roughly $83,557 on Sept. 30; the cryptocurrency traded near $80,000 on Wednesday.

"We are more bullish on bitcoin today than we were last year," Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan said in a statement. He cited the shallow four-year pullback, progress on regulation and the surge in demand for hard assets such as gold.

Same model, larger markets lift the target to $1.6 million

Last year's edition forecast $1.3 million by 2035 with 28.3% annual growth. Bitwise re-ran the same model with updated data, holding bitcoin's share of each addressable market fixed, Hougan wrote in a client memo. With adoption shares pinned in place, the move from $1.3 million to $1.6 million comes from the larger addressable markets rather than any change in the model's adoption assumptions.

The firm's 2036 estimate for the store-of-value market now stands at $110 trillion, up from $91 trillion, while its estimate for institutional investment rose to $303 trillion from $216 trillion. The base case assumes 25% of store-of-value assets and 1% of institutional assets flow into bitcoin. The bear case, at a 2.5% store-of-value share, yields $130,686, while the bull case, at a 50% share, yields $3.67 million — a spread that shows how much of the model's output hinges on the store-of-value adoption assumption.

Bitwise pegs today's institutional assets at about $147 trillion and expects 1% to 5% of them to be allocated to bitcoin over the decade, implying $1.5 trillion to $7.4 trillion in demand. On the supply side, mining creates roughly $14 billion of new bitcoin each year, and about 20.1 million coins — 95.7% of the 21 million cap — are already in circulation. That gap — potential demand measured in trillions against roughly $14 billion of new supply each year — is the arithmetic the forecast rests on.

Volatility forecast cut to 27.8% from 32.9%

Bitcoin shed 53.4% from its peak of $126,080 in October 2025 to $58,717 on June 30. If the low holds, Bitwise said, it would mark the shallowest cyclical retracement on record, following prior drawdowns of 86%, 84% and 77%.

Hougan noted that much of the money flowing into store-of-value assets has been soaked up by gold and that ETF buying slowed. Institutions, however, continued adding exposure throughout the entire drawdown, he wrote, and bitcoin's share of the store-of-value market has grown to more than 5% from less than 1% a decade ago. That share — measured against the base case's 25% assumption — and whether the June 30 low holds are the checkpoints that will show over time how the forecast is tracking.

Bitwise also trimmed its 10-year volatility forecast to 27.8% from 32.9%, and projects average correlation with US stocks of 0.43. In portfolio construction, those two figures are what allocation models use to size a position, so a lower projected volatility and correlation broadens how much bitcoin a diversified portfolio can hold. "Bitcoin will likely remain a volatile asset with sharp downturns, but all signs point to these swings weakening as institutional adoption deepens," said Head of Research Ryan Rasmussen in the statement.

Quantum computing, AI-driven mathematical advances and regulatory reversal top the firm's risk list. Bitwise oversees more than $14 billion in client assets across more than 70 products.

JPMorgan Asset Management was far more conservative in its first-ever long-term bitcoin forecast on Oct. 19, projecting a 10% annual return with 55% volatility, as Cryptopolitan reported. Hougan welcomed the inclusion but said the 55% volatility figure was too high. Back in March, Hougan said bitcoin could reach $1 million by capturing a large share of a $38 trillion store-of-value market.