The consensus that Bitcoin has matured into “digital gold” faces a brand new boundary on Wall Road. It has little to do with day-to-day worth fluctuations and every thing to do with the distant way forward for computing.
Two distinguished strategists named Wooden are at the moment providing diametrically opposed roadmaps to the world’s largest world allocator of crypto belongings.
On January 16, Jefferies’ Christopher Wooden eradicated the agency’s long-standing publicity to Bitcoin, citing the existential menace posed by quantum computing.
In the meantime, ARK Make investments’s Cathie Wooden urges traders to disregard the technical issues and concentrate on the asset’s obvious lack of correlation with conventional markets.
This divergence highlights an vital evolution in how institutional traders will underwrite crypto belongings in 2026. The talk is not nearly whether or not Bitcoin is a speculative token or a retailer of worth.
We have moved into extra advanced calculations round viability, governance, and the precise varieties of hedges that traders imagine they’re shopping for.
quantum exit
Christopher Wooden, world head of fairness technique at Jefferies, constructed a popularity for manipulating market sentiment together with his publication Greed & Concern.
His newest transfer is to fully take away the ten% Bitcoin allocation from his mannequin portfolio, considerably decreasing two years of institutional accumulation.
Within the reallocation, Jefferies moved 10% of its Bitcoin sleeve into belongings with previous tales, 5% into bodily gold and 5% into gold mining shares.
This rationale is rooted in tail threat reasonably than instant market traits. Wooden argued that advances in quantum computing might finally undermine the encryption that protects the Bitcoin community.
Whereas most traders nonetheless base their accusations of quantum threats on “science initiatives,” Jefferies treats that chance as a disqualifier for annuity-style long-term capital.
This concern is being validated amongst expertise consultants who argue that the menace timeline is compressing sooner than the market realizes.
Charles Edwards, founding father of Capriol, claimed that quantum computer systems might beat Bitcoin in simply 2-9 years with out upgrades, and with a excessive chance within the 4-5 yr vary.
Edwards describes the market as coming into a “quantum occasion horizon.” It is a vital threshold the place the frontier threat of hacking is roughly equal to the time required to succeed in consensus on the improve and carry out the rollout.
In Jeffries’ framework, the premise of quantum laptop safety relies on cryptographic primitives which might be weak to future highly effective machines, with the disagreeable actuality that quantum computer systems will at some point be capable of crack Bitcoin.
Particular threats embrace an attacker “harvesting” and storing the uncovered public key now and decrypting the personal key as soon as the {hardware} is mature.
Estimates recommend that greater than 4 million BTC are held in weak addresses because of reuse or outdated codecs. This leaves a “harvest now, decrypt later” assault vector that may probably compromise a big portion of the entire provide.
Quantum computing shouldn’t be a direct menace to Bitcoin
Grayscale, one of many largest digital asset managers, is making an attempt to floor the market dialogue in 2026 by labeling quantum vulnerabilities as this yr’s “crimson crimson herring.”
The evaluation means that whereas the menace is actual, it’s unlikely to drive costs increased within the quick time period.
Contemplating this, Grayscale argued that in the long run, most blockchains and far of the broader financial system will want post-quantum upgrades anyway.
This view is in keeping with developments inside the crypto sector.
Andre Dragosch, head of analysis at Bitwise Europe, additionally refuted the idea of “imminent doom” by highlighting the large computational hole between present expertise and viable assaults.
Whereas justifying issues about older wallets, Dragosh maintains that the community itself remains to be very strong.
He wrote:
“Bitcoin is at the moment working at one zetahash per second, which is the equal of over 1,000,000 El Capitan-class supercomputers. That is an order of magnitude past the attain of as we speak’s quantum machines, and much more than is anticipated within the foreseeable future.”
Within the case of Bitcoin
Contemplating the above, ARK Make investments additional strengthens the case that Bitcoin belongs in a contemporary portfolio exactly as a result of it behaves in a different way than others.
In her 2026 outlook be aware, ARK’s Cathie Wooden targeted on correlations, not ideology.
Her arguments are medical. Bitcoin’s revenue stream has remained much less correlated with main asset lessons since 2020, thus providing a approach to enhance portfolio effectivity.
ARK supported this view with a correlation matrix utilizing weekly returns from January 2020 to January 2026. The info reveals that Bitcoin has a correlation of 0.14 with gold and 0.06 with bonds.
Maybe most stunning, this desk reveals that the correlation between the S&P 500 and bonds is increased than the correlation between Bitcoin and gold.
Wooden makes use of this information to argue that Bitcoin ought to be seen as a priceless diversifier for asset allocators in search of increased returns per unit of threat within the coming years.
This represents a delicate however vital shift in messaging. ARK is reconfiguring Bitcoin from a “new model of gold” to an “uncorrelated return stream with uneven upside.”
Redefining hedging
For traders following the break up between two of the market’s most distinguished strategists, what’s instantly clear is that Bitcoin is not damaged. It’s that the institutional narrative is maturing right into a extra demanding one.
Jefferies is successfully saying that hedging, which can require controversial protocol-level transitions, shouldn’t be the identical as bodily gold, despite the fact that each belongings can rise in the identical macro regime.
It is because gold doesn’t require changes, upgrades, or governance to stay a legitimate asset. Bitcoin, alternatively, is a hedge that finally relies on its potential to adapt.
The counterargument is that conventional finance faces extra of a short-term disaster from quantum computing than from Bitcoin.
Dragosh stated:
“Banks rely closely on long-lived RSA/ECC keys for authentication and interbank communications. If quantum machines can break these, it should allow coordinated assaults a lot sooner than any actual menace to Bitcoin’s decentralized structure.”
With this in thoughts, ARK is successfully saying that portfolio diversification advantages can justify a BTC place, even when the asset remains to be in its infancy.
The query at stake in these instances is due to this fact whether or not Bitcoin can reliably orchestrate a post-quantum transition with out disrupting the social consensus that offers it financial worth.