Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest Forecasts Nearly 9× Growth In Digital Assets To $28 Trillion By 2030

What Happened

Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest is leaning into a big end-of-decade call on crypto.

Image Source: Ark Invest/ Big Ideas 2026

The post Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest Forecasts Nearly 9× Growth in Digital Assets to $28 Trillion by 2030 appeared first on Cryptonews.

Market Context

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.

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.

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.

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 said meme coins remain a small part of most blockchains, making up about 3% or less of capital outside Solana.

Why It Matters

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.

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.

Details

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.

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.

Ark Sees Long Runway For Tokenization Despite Small Current Share