Matthew Sigel, head of digital assets research at asset manager VanEck, has put a $500,000 "North Star" price on Bitcoin (BTC), arguing that the asset becomes worth that much if it takes over part of gold's monetary role while state and institutional adoption keeps widening.

Sigel laid out the framework in a video interview, presenting the $500,000 figure as a guiding long-term benchmark for the firm's valuation work on the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization. In research of this kind, a "North Star" serves as an anchor for long-term valuation scenarios rather than a dated forecast — a distinction that shapes how such a figure should be read.

Bitcoin as 'Digital Gold': The Core of the Thesis

The gold comparison sits at the center of Sigel's argument. Bitcoin has long been described by proponents as "digital gold" because its supply is capped at 21 million coins — a fixed issuance schedule written into its protocol. Gold, whose global market capitalization is commonly estimated in the trillions of dollars, has historically served investors as a store of value and a hedge against currency debasement. If Bitcoin absorbs even part of that monetary, analysts who share this view contend, its market value could rise substantially. The pairing also explains the arithmetic behind the target: the thesis measures a fixed-supply asset against one of the largest store-of-value markets in the world, so even fractional reallocation assumptions underpin per-coin figures of this size.

Institutional and State Adoption

Sigel's framing also rests on continued widening of adoption. Institutional access to Bitcoin expanded markedly after U.S. regulators approved spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds in January 2024, allowing investors to gain exposure through conventional brokerage accounts; VanEck itself sponsors one of those funds, the VanEck Bitcoin Trust (HODL). At the state level, several U.S. states have enacted legislation authorizing strategic Bitcoin or digital asset reserves, a development frequently cited by analysts as evidence of growing official-sector acceptance of the asset. These channels also give the thesis measurable, publicly observable inputs: spot ETF holdings and flows are disclosed regularly, and state reserve laws are a matter of legislative record, offering concrete data points for tracking whether the adoption assumptions behind the target are being met.

VanEck's Prior Long-Term Scenarios

The $500,000 North Star is not the first long-term Bitcoin valuation published by VanEck's research team. In an April 2024 research note, the firm modeled a scenario in which Bitcoin could reach roughly $2.9 million per coin by 2050 if it were to become a global reserve asset. Conditional, long-horizon scenarios of this sort — outcomes tied to adoption milestones rather than calendar-date forecasts — are a common format in institutional digital assets research, laying out the assumptions a given valuation depends on.

VanEck, founded in 1955 and headquartered in New York, was among the early issuers of U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs and has published digital assets research under Sigel since 2018.

This content was first published on COINOTAG: https://en.coinotag.com/vaneck-matthew-sigel-500000-north-star-bitcoin

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.