TL;DR
Hougan predicts Bitcoin will trade sideways after a bruising 2025, with rising institutional interest and early central bank curiosity setting up the next cycle.
The whole 9 yards of 💩
The Royal Flush reporting live from the digital beltway, and yes, we’re talking Bitcoin again. Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan is out there predicting a price that makes most fan-fiction look bashful: $6.5 million per BTC, in 20 years. Not next year, not the year after, but two decades from now. After a bruising 2025, he sees a market that’s mostly moving sideways, with a slowly rising chorus of institutional interest and a whiff of central-bank curiosity warming up for the next cycle.
That’s the kind of prophecy you file under ‘bold, possibly delusional, always entertaining.’ Hougan posits a world where Bitcoin doesn’t explode every few months but rather calibrates itself in a large, patient channel. Sideways trading means fewer moon shots, more institutions creeping in with risk controls, and a price action that doesn’t spasmodically terrify people. It sounds plausible enough to keep the Kool-Aid stand open, but unlikely enough to make you cash out your life savings.
Rising institutional interest is the adult diaper of the crypto space: not glamorous, but necessary. More funds, more custody solutions, more regulated products, more risk controls, less retail mania. And central bank curiosity? That’s the plot twist that makes the story watchable. Not a full-blown CBDC rollout on the moon just yet, but a handful of pilots and research papers that show the idea isn’t a complete fantasy.
Let’s be real: 20 years is a long horizon and almost nothing about tech or markets ages gracefully. A path to $6.5M assumes several favorable conditions: demand scales dramatically, institutions allocate a big chunk, and policy stays benign or supportive. It also assumes the network can weather energy critiques, miner economics, and the inevitable regulatory drumbeat. In other words: one misstep in any of those levers and the chart could look like a roller coaster with a broken track.
Would it take a storm of ETF approvals and a handful of pension funds taking a slice? Possibly. Would it require a couple of large banks embracing Bitcoin as core treasury ballast? Also plausible. And if a central bank starts flirting with a digital currency that plays nice with real-world rails, that could create a new baseline for acceptance that reduces volatility as hedgers come in. We’re not predicting that will happen; we’re saying: if it does, the math behind Hougan’s forecast starts to look less like a moonshot and more like a long-range re-pricing of risk across markets.
From a math standpoint, to reach 6.5M from today’s price (let’s call it around a few tens of thousands, give or take), you’d need roughly a 200x uplift over 20 years. That translates to about a 30% annualized return if the stars align, a figure that isn’t preposterous in a world where macro narratives love to reprice risk. But the caveats are real: the halving cadence, energy headlines, and the regulator with a big stick could flatten the slope at any moment. The staircase to glory might be long, occasionally mossy, and wired with more drama than a season finale of a tech soap opera.
Bottom line: it’s a bold, entertaining forecast that’s worth your attention—part prophecy, part speculative theater. The mix of skepticism and excitement is exactly where Bitcoin tends to live: not a guaranteed path to a moon, but a plausible one if the world leans in, rather than walks away. We’ll be watching, we’ll be adjusting, and we’ll keep the receipts, because the next cycle loves a good plot twist as much as a good rally. —The Royal Flush
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