Cathie Wood Doubles Down: Why She Thinks Bitcoin Outclasses Gold
Ark Invest is not just talking bullishly about Bitcoin – it is backing that conviction with substantial capital. On February 12, the investment firm executed a series of notable purchases across companies tied to the crypto ecosystem, even as Bitcoin’s price has been under pressure.
According to trading disclosures, Ark bought 212,314 shares of Bitmine worth roughly 4.2 million dollars, 74,323 shares of Bullish valued at about 2.4 million dollars, and 174,767 shares of Robinhood totaling close to 12.4 million dollars. These are not token positions designed to “test the waters”; they are significant allocations made at a time when sentiment around Bitcoin has cooled.
That timing is important. Year-to-date, Bitcoin has declined around 26%. Gold, often labeled the classic “safe haven” asset, has moved in the opposite direction and is up about 19% over the same period. At the time of writing, Bitcoin trades near 63,200 dollars per coin, while gold changes hands at roughly 3,180 dollars per troy ounce.
On the surface, those numbers would appear to undermine any argument that investors should pivot from gold to Bitcoin. The scorecard for 2025 so far shows gold outperforming and Bitcoin lagging. The divergence between Cathie Wood’s thesis and the current market performance has rarely been more obvious.
Yet Wood is not retreating. In a recent interview, the Ark Invest founder described Bitcoin as “hands down” better than gold – a forceful endorsement given Bitcoin’s recent slide. Her position is not about a single year’s performance, but about how she expects capital to move over the next decade and beyond.
Wood argues that Bitcoin functions as a hedge in both inflationary and deflationary environments, whereas gold’s role has historically been framed primarily as protection against inflation and currency debasement. In her view, Bitcoin’s programmability, transparent supply schedule, and global, always-on market give it a flexibility and responsiveness that gold cannot replicate.
A key part of her conviction is rooted in who is buying. Institutional exposure to Bitcoin, she notes, is still in its early stages. Pension funds, insurance companies, large asset managers, and sovereign entities have only begun to experiment with direct Bitcoin holdings or Bitcoin-related products. For Wood, this means that the institutional adoption curve is far from mature and could represent a powerful tailwind in the coming years.
Demographics also play a role. Younger investors, raised in a digital-first world, increasingly prefer digital assets to physical bullion. For many of them, the idea of storing value in an internet-native asset is not an exotic concept but a logical extension of how they already conduct their financial lives. Gold’s buyer base, by contrast, is deeply established, older, and more traditional. That stability is a strength in one sense, but it also suggests that most of the demand for gold is already visible, whereas Bitcoin’s future buyer base is still forming.
This difference in maturity between the two markets is central to Wood’s thesis. If gold’s adoption is largely saturated while Bitcoin’s is still in its early chapters, then short-term underperformance may be less important than the long-term trajectory of demand. Early-stage assets are often volatile and can experience painful drawdowns, but they also retain the potential for outsized growth if adoption accelerates.
Ark’s positioning reflects this long-term view. The crypto exchange operator Bullish has become the ninth-largest holding in Ark’s ARKF fund, with a weight of about 3.4% and an approximate value of 30 million dollars. This is not an incidental position; it signals a strong belief that the digital asset trading infrastructure will be far more valuable if Bitcoin and other cryptoassets continue to integrate into mainstream finance.
Beyond Bullish, Ark holds stakes in Block, Circle, and Coinbase, forming a portfolio cluster dedicated to the broader crypto and digital payments ecosystem. Taken together, these investments illustrate Ark’s thesis that companies building around Bitcoin and blockchain technology will be key beneficiaries of the structural changes reshaping global finance.
The reality, however, is that Wood is swimming against the tide in the current macro environment. Gold, the old safe haven, is leading performance tables this year. Bitcoin, the would-be digital successor, is struggling to keep pace. For many market participants, that’s reason enough to favor the metal over the cryptocurrency, at least in the near term.
Ark’s actions say otherwise. The firm appears to view the current gap between gold and Bitcoin not as a warning but as an opening. Declines in Bitcoin-related equities and the coin itself may present what Ark sees as discounted entry points for a long-term thesis that remains intact. Rather than trimming risk in response to volatility, Ark is leaning in.
According to reports, Wood and her team are concentrating on adoption curves, technological progress, and structural shifts in the financial system rather than on quarterly or even annual performance. In this framework, short-term price moves are noise surrounding a much larger signal: the gradual migration of value, infrastructure, and investor attention into the digital realm.
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Why Wood Thinks Bitcoin Beats Gold Over the Long Run
From a structural perspective, Wood’s argument hinges on several characteristics that differentiate Bitcoin from gold:
1. Fixed, transparent supply
Bitcoin’s supply is capped at 21 million coins, with a publicly auditable issuance schedule. Gold’s supply, while finite in the physical world, is less predictable. New discoveries, changes in mining technology, and recycling all influence yearly supply. Wood sees Bitcoin’s hard cap as a superior form of monetary discipline that markets can fully verify in real time.
2. Ease of transfer and custody
Bitcoin can be moved across borders in minutes, settled 24/7, and stored digitally without the logistical overhead of vaults, transportation, or physical verification. Gold requires secure storage, is expensive to move at scale, and is harder to divide and transact with globally. For a world increasingly transacting online, Wood views Bitcoin’s portability as a decisive advantage.
3. Programmability and integration with digital finance
Bitcoin and its surrounding ecosystem can integrate with smart contracts, payment rails, and digital platforms. While gold can be tokenized, its physical nature places limits on how seamlessly it can plug into software-based financial systems. Bitcoin, in contrast, is native to the digital environment that modern finance is rapidly embracing.
4. Market structure and liquidity evolution
The rise of regulated Bitcoin products, from publicly traded companies holding Bitcoin to exchange-traded products and institutional custody solutions, has been building a more mature market infrastructure. Gold’s market is already highly developed, leaving less room for transformative growth.
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The Demographic Shift: Younger Capital, New Preferences
Underpinning Wood’s stance is a generational shift in how capital is allocated. Younger investors are:
– More comfortable using mobile apps and digital wallets than visiting a bank branch or a bullion dealer.
– More likely to trust cryptographic verification than traditional gatekeepers.
– More open to assets that operate outside legacy banking systems, especially after years of witnessing financial crises, stimulus policies, and inflationary pressures.
This cohort is only beginning to reach its peak earning and investing years. As their wealth grows, so does their influence on asset demand. If their preference for Bitcoin over gold persists, it could gradually redirect part of the capital traditionally reserved for precious metals into digital assets.
Gold remains deeply embedded in the portfolios and cultures of older generations and institutions, from central banks to conservative family offices. Wood’s view is not that gold disappears, but that even a modest reallocation of wealth from gold to Bitcoin over time could have an outsized impact on Bitcoin’s price, given its much smaller current market capitalization.
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Risk, Volatility, and the Long Game
Critics of Wood’s position point out that Bitcoin’s volatility far exceeds that of gold. For investors seeking stability in turbulent markets, this is not a trivial concern. Gold’s role as a stabilizer in portfolios has been tested over decades, whereas Bitcoin has only existed since 2009.
Wood’s counterargument hinges on time horizon. Over short spans, Bitcoin’s price can swing violently in response to macro headlines, regulatory developments, or market sentiment. Over longer periods, she believes those swings are less important than the growth in user base, network security, and institutional participation.
From this vantage point, a year like 2025 – in which gold outperforms while Bitcoin struggles – is part of the expected noise. Ark’s continued accumulation of crypto-related equities during drawdowns suggests that it sees volatility not as a deal-breaker but as a feature of early-stage technological assets.
Investors considering Bitcoin as a potential “better gold” must decide whether they are comfortable with that volatility in pursuit of potentially higher long-term returns. For some, gold’s comparative stability and established track record will remain more attractive. For others, especially those with longer time horizons and higher risk tolerance, Bitcoin’s asymmetric upside may justify the turbulence.
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What Ark’s Bets Signal About the Future of Crypto
Ark’s portfolio choices also reveal how it imagines the future shape of the crypto ecosystem:
– Exchanges and liquidity providers (Bullish, Coinbase)
If Bitcoin and digital assets continue to be integrated into mainstream finance, trading platforms stand to benefit from growing volumes and institutional flows.
– Payment and fintech platforms (Block)
Companies enabling users and merchants to interact with Bitcoin as both an asset and, in some cases, a payment option occupy a strategic position at the intersection of traditional finance and crypto.
– Infrastructure and stablecoin issuers (Circle)
As dollar-linked stablecoins and on-chain settlements become more common, the underlying infrastructure may become as important as traditional banking rails.
By building exposure across these segments, Ark is not simply betting on Bitcoin’s price. It is wagering that the infrastructure supporting Bitcoin and other digital assets will become deeply embedded in the financial system, much as payment networks, card issuers, and exchanges did in previous eras.
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Bitcoin vs. Gold: Different Roles, Overlapping Narratives
Despite the “Bitcoin is better than gold” framing, the two assets do not necessarily have to be seen as mutually exclusive. Many investors choose to hold both, assigning different roles to each:
– Gold as a centuries-old hedge against currency debasement and geopolitical turmoil.
– Bitcoin as a high-growth, high-volatility digital asset with long-term potential to function as a store of value in a dematerialized economy.
Wood’s claim that Bitcoin is “hands down” better is ultimately a statement of preference and conviction about the future of money and value storage. It reflects a belief that the world is moving toward digital-native assets and that markets will increasingly reward transparency, programmability, and global accessibility over physical scarcity alone.
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What This Means for Individual Investors
For individuals trying to decide between gold and Bitcoin – or how to balance the two – several practical considerations emerge from Wood’s thesis and Ark’s behavior:
1. Time horizon
If your focus is on preserving capital over the next few years with minimal volatility, gold’s record may be more reassuring. If you are looking 10 or more years ahead and are comfortable with substantial price swings, Bitcoin’s growth potential may be more compelling.
2. Risk tolerance
Bitcoin can experience deep drawdowns and rapid rallies. Position sizing and diversification are critical. Gold’s moves tend to be less extreme but also usually offer lower upside.
3. Conviction in digital transformation
If you believe financial systems will keep migrating onto digital rails, decentralized networks will gain importance, and younger generations will continue favoring digital assets, Bitcoin aligns with that thesis. If you are more skeptical, gold may feel like the safer anchor.
4. Portfolio construction
Some investors allocate a portion of their “store of value” or “alternative asset” bucket to both, allowing them to benefit from digital upside while still retaining exposure to a traditional hedge.
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The Bottom Line
For now, the scoreboard favors gold. In 2025, it is outperforming Bitcoin by a wide margin, and the metal’s reputation as a defensive asset remains intact. Markets, in aggregate, are not yet behaving as though Bitcoin has fully replaced gold as the world’s preferred hedge.
Cathie Wood and Ark Invest are positioning for a future in which that equation looks very different. Their recent purchases in Bitcoin-exposed equities, alongside an already sizable allocation to crypto-related firms, signal a belief that the real story is not this quarter’s performance gap, but the decades-long shift in how value is stored, transacted, and secured.
Whether Bitcoin ultimately lives up to Wood’s “hands down better than gold” label remains to be seen. But Ark’s moves underscore one clear point: the battle for the role of digital-era safe haven has only just begun, and the outcome will likely hinge on technology, demographics, and the evolving architecture of global finance rather than on a single year’s price chart.