Ryan Rasmussen, Head of Research at Bitwise, used a Yahoo Finance appearance to restate Bitwise’s view that Bitcoin is headed to $200,000 in 2026, while simultaneously characterizing the current sell-off as a maturing-market shakeout rather than a trend break.
He pointed to hedge funds rotating in and out via basis trades and emphasized that “you just have more market participants.” Over time, he expects that shift to damp volatility, but not in a straight line: “throughout that journey, we’re going to see some choppiness, and certainly over the past month, we’ve seen that.”
Pressed on why volatility still looks elevated, Rasmussen separated short-horizon spikes from long-run trend. “If you look at the trend over the past 10 years, volatility has certainly been falling,” he said, but conceded that “over this short-term period, you do see spikes in volatility.” The composition of buyers is, in his view, changing in a stabilizing direction. “The buyers for Bitcoin that we’re seeing come into the market today are more long-term buyers than we’ve seen in the past,” he said, naming wealth managers and financial advisors who “are adding Bitcoin to model portfolios” and “rebalancing on a standard basis.”
Rasmussen acknowledged the pain of lower prices for recent buyers, but insisted the medium-term path remains higher. “Lower prices are a gift and a curse, of course,” he said. “A lot of investors are feeling pain right now who bought Bitcoin above $100,000 or closer to the $125,000 mark, but we believe that Bitcoin’s going to end the year higher than it is today.”
On macro, Rasmussen conceded an irony that an asset marketed as sovereign and untethered now reacts to central-bank expectations. Post-COVID, he said, Bitcoin has traded in a “fiscally-dominated environment where rate cuts and other macro elements do play more of a role,” and correlations to equities have “spike[d] or raise[d].”
The price target itself was stated unambiguously. “So this year, we had a price target of $200,000. And I think it’s safe to say that come December, that’s not going to happen. But we do believe that in 2026, Bitcoin will hit $200,000,” Rasmussen said. He attributed that forecast to institutional inflows arriving “in waves,” spanning “wealth managers or endowments or pensions or corporations or governments,” which he believes are creating “a systemic imbalance of demand versus supply.”
At press time, BTC traded at $91,205.
