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 day by day worth volatility and every thing to do with the distant way forward for computing.
Two outstanding strategists named Wooden are at the moment providing diametrically opposed roadmaps to international 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 menace posed by quantum computing.
However, Cathie Wooden of ARK Make investments is urging traders to look previous technical anxieties and deal with the asset’s distinct lack of correlation with conventional markets.
This divergence highlights a important evolution in how institutional capital is underwriting crypto property in 2026. The talk is now not merely about whether or not Bitcoin is a speculative token or a retailer of worth.
It has shifted towards a extra complicated calculation relating to survivability, governance, and the precise sort of hedge traders 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 & Concern” 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 completely.
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 speedy market dynamics. Wooden argued that advances in quantum computing may ultimately undermine the cryptography that secures the Bitcoin community.
Whereas most traders nonetheless file quantum threats below “science initiatives,” Jefferies is treating the chance as a disqualifying issue for pension-style, long-horizon capital.
This nervousness is discovering validation amongst technical consultants who argue the timeline for a menace is compressing sooner than markets understand.
Charles Edwards, founding father of Capriole, argued {that a} quantum laptop may 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 important 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 laptop will sometime be capable of crack Bitcoin as a result of its safety assumptions relaxation on cryptographic primitives which might be weak to these highly effective future machines.
The precise menace includes 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 attributable to reuse or older codecs. This leaves a “harvest now, decrypt later” assault vector that might compromise an enormous share of the full provide.
Quantum computing just isn’t a direct Bitcoin menace
Grayscale, one of many largest digital-asset managers, has sought to floor the 2026 market dialog by labeling quantum vulnerability a “pink herring” for this yr.
Its evaluation means that, whereas the menace 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 throughout the crypto sector.
Andre Dragosch, Bitwise Europe’s Head of Analysis, has additionally countered the “speedy 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 right this 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 not like the rest.
In a 2026 outlook notice, 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 courses since 2020, due to this fact providing a means to enhance portfolio effectivity.
ARK supported this view with a correlation matrix utilizing weekly returns from January 2020 by way of January 2026. The information reveals Bitcoin’s correlation with gold at 0.14 and with bonds at 0.06.
Maybe most strikingly, the desk reveals that the S&P 500’s correlation with bonds is larger than Bitcoin’s correlation with gold.
Wooden makes use of this information to argue that Bitcoin needs to be seen as a priceless diversifier for asset allocators searching for larger returns per unit of danger within the years forward.
This represents a delicate however essential shift in messaging. ARK is reframing Bitcoin from “a more recent model of gold” into “an uncorrelated return stream with uneven upside.”
Redefining the hedge
For traders watching the break up between two of the market’s high-profile strategists, the speedy takeaway just isn’t 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 just isn’t the identical as bodily gold, even when each property can rally in the identical macro regime.
It’s because gold doesn’t require coordination, upgrades, or governance to stay a legitimate asset. However, Bitcoin is a hedge that in the end depends upon its potential to adapt.
Conversely, there’s a counterargument that conventional finance faces better near-term peril from quantum computing than Bitcoin does.
Dragosch mentioned:
“Banks rely closely on long-lived RSA/ECC keys throughout authentication and interbank communications. As soon as quantum machines can break these, systemic assaults turn into potential – far sooner than any reasonable menace 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 continues to be evolving.
So, the query that hangs over these instances is whether or not Bitcoin can credibly coordinate a post-quantum transition with out splintering the social consensus that offers it financial worth.
