Most Influential: Cathie Wood
TL;DR
Cathie Wood's bullish crypto outlook includes a revised $1.2M bitcoin forecast for 2030. Ark Invest's ETFs, including a top spot bitcoin ETF and holdings in Coinbase, reflect her influence. The article also notes GoPlus revenue and LI.FI funding as industry metrics.
Key Takeaways
- •Cathie Wood revised her bitcoin price target to $1.2 million by 2030, citing stablecoin growth.
- •Ark Invest's spot bitcoin ETF is the third-largest in the U.S., and its ETFs hold major crypto assets like Coinbase.
- •Wood's investment strategy through Ark serves as a guide to high-growth disruptive technologies.
- •Industry data includes GoPlus generating $4.7M revenue and LI.FI securing $29M in Series A extension funding.
It says a lot about the ever-bullish outlook of Ark Invest CEO Cathie Wood that she predicted bitcoin to reach $1.2 million by 2030, and it was, in fact, a downgrade.
This feature is a part of CoinDesk's Most Influential 2025 list.
Cathie Wood made her forecast for BTC's price in November 2025, slightly revising the target down from $1.5 million based on the explosive rise of stablecoins, which she claimed may usurp some of bitcoin's value as a transactional instrument.
Her impact on cryptocurrency goes beyond her notoriously bullish predictions, however. Ark's spot bitcoin ETF, which it listed in partnership with 21Shares, is the third-largest such product in the U.S. behind only the runaway market leaders provided by asset management giants BlackRock and Fidelity.
Wood's optimistic outlook for the cryptocurrency industry is evident in the holdings of some of Ark's largest ETFs. The firm’s $8.4 billion Innovation ETF counts crypto exchange Coinbase among its largest holdings, as do two of Ark's other largest ETFs by net assets.
The initial public offerings (IPOs) in 2025 of stablecoin issuer Circle and crypto exchange Bullish (the parent company of CoinDesk) also prompted sizeable investments by Ark.
Through its ETFs, Ark and, by extension, Wood, who also holds the role of chief investment officer (CIO), may represent a North Star for understanding which disruptive technologies are likely to provide the most lucrative high-growth plays.
- As of October 2025, GoPlus has generated $4.7M in total revenue across its product lines. The GoPlus App is the primary revenue driver, contributing $2.5M (approx. 53%), followed by the SafeToken Protocol at $1.7M.
- GoPlus Intelligence's Token Security API averaged 717 million monthly calls year-to-date in 2025 , with a peak of nearly 1 billion calls in February 2025. Total blockchain-level requests, including transaction simulations, averaged an additional 350 million per month.
- Since its January 2025 launch , the $GPS token has registered over $5B in total spot volume and $10B in derivatives volume in 2025. Monthly spot volume peaked in March 2025 at over $1.1B , while derivatives volume peaked the same month at over $4B.
- J.P. Morgan arranged Galaxy Digital’s commercial paper issuance on the Solana blockchain, one of the first of its kind in the U.S.
- Coinbase and Franklin Templeton bought the short-term debt instrument, settled in USDC
- Tokenization of real-world assets is gaining traction, with projections suggesting the market could reach $18.9 trillion by 2033.
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