Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest is leaning into a big end-of-decade call on crypto. In its Big Ideas 2026 report published Wednesday, the firm says digital assets could reach $28 trillion in market value by 2030. That is up from about $3.13 trillion today, a jump of roughly 9x. The firm framed the estimate around two buckets, smart contract networks and “pure-play digital currencies”, which it describes as stores of value, mediums of exchange, and units of account on public blockchains. Ark said the market “could grow at an annual rate of ~61% to $28 trillion in 2030”. Ark also expects Bitcoin to dominate the pie. “We believe Bitcoin could account for 70% of the market,” it said, with the rest led by smart contract networks such as Ethereum and Solana . Image Source: Ark Invest/ Big Ideas 2026 Ark Sees Bitcoin Market Cap Climbing To $16 Trillion By 2030 Based on Ark’s forecast, Bitcoin’s market cap could rise at a compound annual growth rate of about 63% during the next five years, climbing from nearly $2 trillion to $16 trillion by 2030. The report also argued that Bitcoin is increasingly behaving like a safe-haven asset, pointing to lower volatility and drawdowns in 2025 that looked shallow versus its own history across 5-year, 3-year, 1-year, and 3-month windows. Institutional ownership is a big part of that story. Ark said US spot Bitcoin ETFs and public companies held about 12% of total Bitcoin supply, up from 8.7%, after Bitcoin ETF balances rose 19.7% in 2025 from about 1.12M to about 1.29M, and public company holdings jumped 73% from roughly 598,000 to about 1.09M. Bitcoin’s maturation is showing. ARK's Big Ideas 2026 research details rising adoption, leading risk-adjusted performance, the shallowest drawdowns in its history, and more. Read @dpuellARK ’s thread below and download the report for a deeper dive: https://t.co/Uw1o20VSMc https://t.co/L8GynmfSQz — ARK Invest (@ARKInvest) January 21, 2026 Smart Contract Networks Could Grow At A 54% Annual Pace Regarding smart contracts, Ark projected that the segment could reach approximately $6 trillion by 2030, growing at a 54% annual rate, as networks generate annualized revenue of around $192B at an average take rate of 0.75%. It also expects two to three Layer-1 platforms to take the lion’s share, with valuations driven more by monetary premium than discounted cash flows. Ark’s report kept Ethereum in the lead when it comes to on-chain assets, saying assets on Ethereum now exceed $400B. It also said stablecoins and the top 50 tokens make up about 90% of market value across seven of the eight most popular blockchains. Ark Sees Long Runway For Tokenization Despite Small Current Share Ark said meme coins remain a small part of most blockchains, making up about 3% or less of capital outside Solana. Solana is the exception, where meme coins account for about 21% of assets. The firm also said tokenization of real-world assets could be one of the fastest-growing areas, as off-chain assets offer the biggest opportunity for on-chain growth. That tokenization thesis is where Ark put another headline number. The firm said tokenized assets could grow from $19B to $11 trillion by 2030, which would still be only about 1.38% of all financial assets, suggesting plenty of runway even in a bullish scenario. Sovereign debt dominates tokenization today, Ark said, and it expects bank deposits and global public equities to move a bigger share of value on-chain over the next five years. It tied broad adoption to regulatory clarity and institutional-grade infrastructure, signalling that the plumbing may matter as much as the protocols. The post Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest Forecasts Nearly 9× Growth in Digital Assets to $28 Trillion by 2030 appeared first on Cryptonews .
