In a wide-ranging Coin Stories interview published October 21, David Marcus—co-founder and CEO of Lightspark, former president of PayPal and co-creator of Diem, the cryptocurrency project initiated by Facebook—laid out a thesis that Bitcoin will ultimately surpass gold in value and evolve from a purely “store-of-value” asset into the invisible, neutral settlement layer of the internet for money.
Marcus’s price view is inseparable from his broader contention that BTC must progress beyond a narrow “digital gold” narrative. Echoing a line from analyst Matt Pines that Brunell cited—“if Bitcoin is only a store of value, it has failed”—Marcus agreed “fully,” but added a critical caveat: the savings-asset phase was a necessary precondition for utility.
“We believe that the store-of-value phase is absolutely essential for us to be able to actually build a utility phase of Bitcoin on top of it,” he said, arguing that institutional adoption, ETFs and nation-state accumulation conferred enough legitimacy to begin scaling real-world payments. “Now that every institution… whether it’s BlackRock, Fidelity or others, are actually supporting Bitcoin… we can actually really start building payment utility on top of it.”
Lightspark’s approach is to move fiat end-to-end while using BTC in the middle. “You can send dollars from a US bank account to someone in Mexico receiving Mexican peso… the settlement asset is Bitcoin in between. So you have dollars, Bitcoin, Mexican peso and it’s invisible to people using it.”
The company’s newly launched “Spark” is described as a Lightning-compatible, non-channel payment system that enables spinning up “billions of wallets” with “minimal new trust assumptions.” Crucially, he said, it preserves safety valves: “It’s not as trustless as Lightning, but we believe it’s trustless enough and has unilateral exits to Layer 1… you can pull a rip cord and no one can prevent you from recovering your funds on L1.”
Marcus also argued that stablecoins—despite their centralized issuer model—are an unavoidable component of global payments, and that anchoring them to BTC’s settlement layer enhances resilience. He described a personal “schizophrenic journey” with stablecoins, disliking the “single throat to choke,” yet accepting their ubiquity and attempting to minimize trust by avoiding separate gas tokens and preserving unilateral exits to Bitcoin L1.
Overall, Marcus’ thesis returns to first principles: BTC as neutral, scarce, programmable collateral and a credibly decentralized settlement layer. Dismissing critiques that it lacks “intrinsic value,” he argued, “Underlying scarcity of Bitcoin secured by code is the intrinsic value… this is the only thing that’s deflationary by nature.”
That, he contends, is why Bitcoin should outcompete gold over time: “When the first gold ETFs were launched, they started mining more gold. You can’t do that with Bitcoin.” If and when that market-cap crossover arrives, it would validate the structural call embedded in his remarks—and, by extension, the headline-grabbing notion that BTC’s fair value is not just above seven figures, but ultimately “more valuable than gold,” which today maps to $1.5 million.
At press time, BTC traded at $109,060.
