Kraken’s Dan Held: Bitcoin Market Cap Could Settle Between $50T and $150T

Though bitcoin’s market cap hit $1 trillion again during its latest price rally, Kraken Growth Marketing Director Dan Held said Wednesday that number is a small fraction of the crypto asset’s total addressable market.

“I think it’s very reasonable to see bitcoin in that $50 trillion to $150 trillion market cap size in its final existence if bitcoin succeeds as a global reserve currency, or gold 2.0,” Held said during CoinDesk’s virtual Bitcoin for Advisors event.

Gold’s market capitalization is currently about $10 trillion, while all fiat money is roughly $60 trillion, the Kraken executive noted. 

Real estate, which Held called a “quintessential store-of-value asset across the world,” carries a market cap of about $250 trillion globally.

“If there’s someone who’s wanting to park $10 million in a property in London, they’re parking that into real estate because of a lot of similar principles [as bitcoin] — fixed supply, or a semi-constrained supply, strong property rights,” he said. 

Bitcoin’s market capitalization was at about $1.04 trillion as of 5:00 pm ET Wednesday upon its price eclipsing $55,000, according to CoinGecko data. The global cryptocurrency market cap stands at about $2.4 trillion, with Ethereum’s $425 billion market cap being the second highest in the space. 

Held leads growth marketing at Kraken, the largest crypto exchange by euro trading volumes. He formerly worked at Interchange, a portfolio reconciliation tool for crypto institutional traders that Kraken acquired in 2019. 

His comments come after other industry executives have made bullish predictions about the growth of the crypto market. 

​​Pantera Capital CEO Dan Morehead said during a panel at Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit last month that the overall cryptocurrency market capitalization could hit $40 trillion in five years. While he noted that bitcoin could grow by 10 times during that span, Morehead expects other crypto segments to go up even more.

Morehead said in Pantera’s latest investment letter on Wednesday that “we’re in a new bull market.”

Held also called unit bias — the concept that investors would rather buy a whole unit of a given currency instead of a fractional quantity — a problem during the virtual panel. 

“The price is relatively meaningless unless we know how many units are out there, so we should look at market cap,” Held said. “At a $1 trillion market cap, bitcoin is very undervalued.”