The consensus that Bitcoin has matured into “digital gold” faces a brand new fracture line on Wall Road, one which has little to do with each day worth volatility and the whole lot to do with the distant way forward for computing.
Two distinguished strategists named Wooden are at present providing diametrically opposed roadmaps to world allocators for the world’s largest crypto asset.
On Jan. 16, Christopher Wooden of Jefferies eradicated his agency’s long-standing Bitcoin publicity, citing the existential risk posed by quantum computing.
Alternatively, Cathie Wooden of ARK Make investments is urging buyers to look previous technical anxieties and give attention to the asset’s distinct lack of correlation with conventional markets.
This divergence highlights a vital evolution in how institutional capital is underwriting crypto property in 2026. The talk is not merely about whether or not Bitcoin is a speculative token or a retailer of worth.
It has shifted towards a extra advanced calculation concerning survivability, governance, and the precise kind of hedge buyers consider they’re shopping for.
The quantum exit
Christopher Wooden, the worldwide head of fairness technique at Jefferies, constructed a popularity for navigating market sentiment together with his “Greed & Worry” e-newsletter.
His newest transfer cuts towards the grain of two years of institutional accumulation by eradicating a ten% Bitcoin allocation from his mannequin portfolio totally.
Within the reallocation, Jefferies shifted the ten% Bitcoin sleeve into property with older narratives: 5% into bodily gold and 5% into gold-mining shares.
The rationale is rooted in tail danger reasonably than quick market dynamics. Wooden argued that advances in quantum computing might finally undermine the cryptography that secures the Bitcoin community.
Whereas most buyers nonetheless file quantum threats underneath “science tasks,” Jefferies is treating the chance as a disqualifying issue for pension-style, long-horizon capital.
This anxiousness is discovering validation amongst technical specialists who argue the timeline for a risk is compressing quicker than markets notice.
Charles Edwards, founding father of Capriole, argued {that a} quantum pc might break Bitcoin in simply 2 to 9 years with out an improve, with a excessive likelihood within the 4- to 5-year vary.
Edwards describes the market as having entered a “Quantum Occasion Horizon,” a vital threshold at which the frontier danger of a hack is roughly equal to the time required to achieve improve consensus and execute a rollout.
Within the Jefferies framing, the uncomfortable actuality is {that a} quantum pc will sometime have the ability to crack Bitcoin as a result of its safety assumptions relaxation on cryptographic primitives which can be weak to these highly effective future machines.
The particular risk entails adversaries “harvesting” uncovered public keys now to retailer them and decrypt the non-public keys later when {hardware} matures.
Estimates recommend greater than 4 million BTC are held in weak addresses resulting from reuse or older codecs. This leaves a “harvest now, decrypt later” assault vector that would compromise a large share of the entire provide.
Quantum computing is just not an instantaneous Bitcoin risk
Grayscale, one of many largest digital-asset managers, has sought to floor the 2026 market dialog by labeling quantum vulnerability a “purple herring” for this yr.
Its evaluation means that, whereas the risk is actual, it’s unlikely to drive costs within the close to time period.
Contemplating this, Grayscale argued that within the longer run, most blockchains and far of the broader financial system will want post-quantum upgrades anyway.
This view aligns with developments inside the crypto sector.
Andre Dragosch, Bitwise Europe’s Head of Analysis, has additionally countered the “quick doom” narrative by emphasizing the sheer computational gulf between present expertise and a viable assault.
Whereas Dragosch validated issues about older wallets, he argues that the community itself stays terribly sturdy.
He wrote:
“Bitcoin now runs at 1 zeta hash per second, equal to a couple of million El Capitan-class supercomputers. That’s orders of magnitude past the attain of at the moment’s quantum machines – and even past these anticipated within the foreseeable future.”
The case for Bitcoin
Contemplating the above, ARK Make investments is doubling down on the argument that Bitcoin belongs in fashionable portfolios exactly as a result of it behaves in contrast to the rest.
In a 2026 outlook word, ARK’s Cathie Wooden leaned on correlations reasonably than ideology.
Her argument is medical: Bitcoin’s return stream has remained weakly linked to main asset lessons since 2020, subsequently providing a means to enhance portfolio effectivity.
ARK supported this view with a correlation matrix utilizing weekly returns from January 2020 by January 2026. The info exhibits Bitcoin’s correlation with gold at 0.14 and with bonds at 0.06.
Maybe most strikingly, the desk exhibits that the S&P 500’s correlation with bonds is increased than Bitcoin’s correlation with gold.
Wooden makes use of this knowledge to argue that Bitcoin must be considered as a useful diversifier for asset allocators searching for increased returns per unit of danger within the years forward.
This represents a refined however necessary shift in messaging. ARK is reframing Bitcoin from “a more moderen model of gold” into “an uncorrelated return stream with uneven upside.”
Redefining the hedge
For buyers watching the break up between two of the market’s high-profile strategists, the quick takeaway is just not that Bitcoin is damaged. It’s that the institutional narrative is maturing into one thing extra demanding.
Jefferies is successfully saying {that a} hedge which may require a contentious protocol-level migration is just not the identical as bodily gold, even when each property can rally in the identical macro regime.
It is because gold doesn’t require coordination, upgrades, or governance to stay a legitimate asset. Alternatively, Bitcoin is a hedge that finally depends upon its skill to adapt.
Conversely, there’s a counterargument that conventional finance faces higher near-term peril from quantum computing than Bitcoin does.
Dragosch stated:
“Banks rely closely on long-lived RSA/ECC keys throughout authentication and interbank communications. As soon as quantum machines can break these, systemic assaults grow to be attainable – far sooner than any sensible risk to Bitcoin’s decentralized structure.”
With this in thoughts, ARK is successfully saying that the advantages of portfolio diversification can justify a BTC place, even when the asset remains to be evolving.
So, the query that hangs over these circumstances is whether or not Bitcoin can credibly coordinate a post-quantum transition with out splintering the social consensus that provides it financial worth.
