Billion-dollar asset manager ARK Invest has raised its “bull case” Bitcoin price target from $1.5 million to $2.4 million by the end of 2030, driven largely by institutional investors and Bitcoin’s increasing acceptance as “digital gold.”
ARK’s “bear” and “base” case scenarios for the price of Bitcoin (BTC) were also bumped up to $500,000 and $1.2 million, ARK research analyst David Puell said in an April 24 report.
The new bear and base targets were bumped up from ARK’s $300,000 and $710,000 Bitcoin price predictions on Feb. 11.
ARK’s price projections were modeled on Bitcoin’s total addressable market (TAM), penetration rate — the percentage of Bitcoin’s TAM that it could capture in certain cases — and Bitcoin’s supply schedule.
ARK’s bear, base and bull case price targets for Bitcoin by Dec. 31, 2030. Source: ARK Invest
“Institutional investment contributes the most to our bull case,” said Puell, who estimated that Bitcoin would achieve a 6.5% penetration rate into the $200 trillion financial market in a best-case scenario (that figure excludes gold).
Bitcoin’s acceptance as “digital gold” was also a major contributor to the lofty estimate, with Puell estimating that it could capture up to 60% of gold’s $18 trillion market cap (2024 figures) by the end of 2030 in a bull scenario.
Bitcoin becoming a “safe haven” in emerging markets was the third-largest contributor to ARK’s $2.4 million bull case prediction at 13.5%.
“This Bitcoin use case has the greatest potential for capital accrual,” Puell said, pointing to Bitcoin’s ability to protect wealth from inflation and devaluation in developing countries.
Bitcoin use cases contributing to ARK’s Bitcoin price targets. Source: ARK Invest
ARK’s Bitcoin predictions are bold
A $2.4 million Bitcoin price tag would send Bitcoin’s market cap to $49.2 trillion, assuming that Bitcoin’s total supply will have reached 20.5 million by the end of 2030.
A $49.2 trillion valuation would be almost larger than the current gross domestic products of the US and China combined.
Even ARK’s bear and base targets of $500,000 and $1.2 million would mean Bitcoin needs to increase at a compounded annual growth rate of 32% and 53% by the end of 2030 — a return that isn’t achieved too often for assets that have already notched trillion-dollar valuations.
Since then, Bitcoin has recovered from a 2025 low of $75,160, soaring back up to the $94,000 range, while the Trump administration established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
The capital city of Slovenia — Ljubljana — has been named the world’s most crypto-friendly city by migration advisory firm Multipolitan.
The city outranked runners-up Hong Kong and Switzerland’s economic powerhouse Züric, which scored the same in the Crypto-Friendly Cities Index, found in its 2025 Crypto Report.
The index featured 20 cities and ranked their crypto-friendliness based on their regulations, tax environment, lifestyle factors and digital and crypto infrastructure.
Multipolitan said its evaluation included weighing areas such as a city’s licensing frameworks, capital gains tax rates, GDP per capita, housing affordability and internet speeds.
“The presence of crypto ATMs and retail adoption rates were analysed to reflect each city’s embedded cryptocurrency culture,” it explained. “High concentrations of these assets earned the top scores.”
The city-state of Singapore and the United Arab Emirates’ capital of Abu Dhabi were respectively ranked fourth and fifth after the second-place tie. Both cities were already attractive to businesses due to offering low or no taxes, but they’ve also worked to attract crypto companies with industry-specific licensing and regulatory regimes.
Sydney, Australia’s most populous city, ranked in the middle of the pack in 10th spot, with the report noting it was home to the most crypto ATMs of the group. Source: Multipolitan
Madison, the capital city of the US state of Wisconsin, was the only city in the Americas to rank on the index, hitting the same 11th place score as Latvia’s capital of Riga, Qatar’s capital of Doha, and Saudi Arabia’s capital of Riyadh.
Slovenia’s crypto embrace
Slovenia also topped Multipolitan’s Crypto Wealth Concentration Index, combining crypto ownership rates and trading volumes, which reported that the average Slovenian crypto owner held around $240,500 worth of assets.
The figure outranked second-place Cyprus by over $65,000, with the average crypto-holding Cypriot hanging onto around $175,000. Hong Kong came in third with holdings averaging $97,500.
The US ranked at the bottom of the 20-strong list, coming in 17th spot with average crypto holdings of around $23,300, just above Malaysia’s nearly $21,000 average holdings.
Slovenia, being part of the EU, regulates crypto under the bloc’s Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), which the industry received as mostly positive.
The advocacy group Blockchain Alliance Europe is based in Ljubljana. The city also houses the blockchain real estate platform Blocksquare, which teamed up with Vera Capital on April 18 to tokenize $1 billion worth of US real estate.
The Italian municipality of Fornelli in the Molise region of Italy will be dedicating a monument to pseudonymous Bitcoin (BTC) creator Satoshi Nakamoto.
In an April 23 Facebook post from the municipality, Fornelli said it plans to unveil the Satoshi artwork on May 1. Details surrounding the monument were unclear in the announcement, but the municipality said it had been designed by artist Mattia Pannoni and financed by the local government.
“It is important, indeed fundamental, as an administration, to take into consideration all the new ideas that come from our young people,” said Fornelli Mayor Giovanni Tedeschi.
According to the local government, Fornelli has the “highest density of Bitcoin adoption in the world” among its roughly 1,800 residents. Other regions have attempted to use BTC or other cryptocurrencies to attract visitors, including the Bitcoin Beach area of El Salvador and the Swiss city of Zug, which accepts crypto payments for many local goods and services.
Portraying a faceless individual through art
The identity of Satoshi, whether a single individual or a group of people, remains one of the biggest mysteries in the crypto space since the publication of the Bitcoin white paper in 2008.
Many artists, both crypto investors and otherwise, have released artwork attempting to represent the pseudonymous creator through statues and digital images. A common theme in these pieces is showing Satoshi without any clearly defined facial features, sometimes wearing a hoodie or working on a computer.
According to the announcement, the monument will be unveiled in the Piazza Umberto I area of Fornelli on May 1.
Troubled electric vehicle startup Faraday Future’s board of directors has appointed founder Jia Yueting as the company’s co-CEO, three years after he was sidelined following an internal probe into allegations of fraud — a probe that led to a investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission that remains ongoing. Jia will serve alongside current CEO […]
It turns out that decentralized social networks can go down, too. On Thursday evening, the decentralized social network Bluesky experienced a significant outage, leaving users unable to load the app on both the web and mobile devices for roughly an hour. According to a message on Bluesky’s status page, the company was aware of the […]
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay Thursday highlighting how little researchers understand about the inner workings of the world’s leading AI models. To address that, Amodei set an ambitious goal for Anthropic to reliably detect most AI model problems by 2027. Amodei acknowledges the challenge ahead. In “The Urgency of Interpretability,” the CEO says Anthropic has […]
This AI startup raised $5.3 million to help people “cheat on everything.” But in the age of AI, how do you define cheating? Columbia University recently suspended student Roy Lee for building a tool to help people cheat on engineering interviews. He’s been making waves on X after posting a long thread detailing the saga and […]
OpenAI is bringing a new “lightweight” version of its ChatGPT deep research tool, which scours the web to compile research reports on a topic, to ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users, the company announced Thursday. The new lightweight deep research, which will also come to free ChatGPT users starting today, is powered by a version […]
Organizations are deepening their cloud investments at an unprecedented pace, recognizing its fundamental role in driving business agility and innovation. Synergy Research Group reports that companies spent $84 billion worldwide on cloud infrastructure services in the third quarter of 2024, a 23% rise over the third quarter of 2023 and the fourth consecutive quarter in which the year-on-year growth rate has increased.
Allowing users to access IT systems from anywhere in the world, cloud services also ensure solutions remain highly configurable and automated.
At the same time, hosted services like generative AI and tailored industry solutions can help companies quickly launch applications and grow the business. To get the most out of these services, companies are turning to cloud optimization—the process of selecting and allocating cloud resources to reduce costs while maximizing performance.
But despite all the interest in the cloud, many workloads remain stranded on-premises, and many more are not optimized for efficiency and growth, greatly limiting the forward momentum. Companies are missing out on a virtuous cycle of mutually reinforcing results that comes from even more efficient use of the cloud.
Organizations can enhance security, make critical workloads more resilient, protect the customer experience, boost revenues, and generate cost savings. These benefits can fuel growth and avert expenses, generating capital that can be invested in innovation.
“Cloud optimization involves making sure that your cloud spending is efficient so you’re not spending wastefully,” says André Dufour, Director and General Manager for AWS Cloud Optimization at Amazon Web Services. “But you can’t think of it only as cost savings at the expense of other things. Dollars freed up through optimization can be redirected to fund net new innovations, like generative AI.”
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This content was researched, designed, and written entirely by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.
This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology.
Inside the controversial tree farms powering Apple’s carbon neutral goal
“We were losing the light, and still about 20 kilometers from the main road, when the car shuddered and died at the edge of a strange forest.
The grove grew as if indifferent to certain unspoken rules of botany. There was no understory, no foreground or background, only the trees themselves, which grew as a wall of bare trunks that rose 100 feet or so before concluding with a burst of thick foliage near the top. The rows of trees ran perhaps the length of a New York City block and fell away abruptly on either side into untidy fields of dirt and grass. The vista recalled the husk of a failed condo development, its first apartments marooned when the builders ran out of cash.”
This is the opening to our latest Big Story, which we are excited to share today. It’s all about how Apple (and its peers) are planting vast forests of eucalyptus trees in Brazil to try to offset their climate emissions, striking some of the largest-ever deals for carbon credits in the process.
The big question is: Can Latin America’s eucalyptus be a scalable climate solution? Read the full story.
—Gregory Barber
This article is part of the Big Story series: MIT Technology Review’s most important, ambitious reporting that takes a deep look at the technologies that are coming next and what they will mean for us and the world we live in. Check out the rest of them here.
The vibes are shifting for US climate tech
The past few years have been an almost nonstop parade of good news for climate tech in the US. Headlines about billion-dollar grants from the government, massive private funding rounds, and labs churning out advance after advance have been routine. Now, though, things are starting to shift.
About $8 billion worth of US climate tech projects have been canceled or downsized so far in 2025. There are still projects moving forward, but these cancellations definitely aren’t a good sign. So, how worried should we be? Read the full story.
—Casey Crownhart
This article is from The Spark, MIT Technology Review’s weekly climate newsletter. To receive it in your inbox every Wednesday, sign up here.
The must-reads
I’ve combed the internet to find you today’s most fun/important/scary/fascinating stories about technology.
1 Elon Musk had a shouting match with the US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent did not take DOGE meddling with the IRS lying down. (Axios) + Musk announced he’d spend less time on government work shortly afterwards. (WP $) + What has the agency achieved in its first 100 days? Chaos. (Reuters)
2 Trump’s tariffs are disrupting production of vital medical devices Of everything from MRI scanners to glucose monitors. (FT $) + The tariffs aren’t good news for protective medical gear makers either. (NYT $)
3 Nvidia has released a new platform for building AI agents And unlike its rivals, it relies on open-source models to make them. (WSJ $) + Nvidia has a very specific vision for how they’ll work. (The Register) + Why handing over total control to AI agents would be a huge mistake. (MIT Technology Review)
4 Even Mark Zuckerberg thinks social media isn’t what it was The question is, what comes next? (New Yorker $) + Meta’s Oversight Board ruled that videos disparaging trans women aren’t hate speech. (WP $) + How to fix the internet. (MIT Technology Review)
5 How AI can help programmers preserve aging computer code Governments across the world are using AI tools to modernize their systems. (Bloomberg $) + The race to save our online lives from a digital dark age. (MIT Technology Review)
6 LinkedIn is rolling out its verification system Adobe is among its first adoptees. (The Verge)
7 Google’s AI Overviews is making stuff up again This time, it’s confidently claiming that made-up idioms are real. (Wired $) + Why Google’s AI Overviews gets things wrong. (MIT Technology Review)
8 Reselling apps are flourishing in the US Savvy shoppers are dodging tariffs by shopping second-hand. (WP $) + The end of ultra-cheap shopping is nigh. (Rest of World)
9 How to create a new color Olo is a bit like teal—but it doesn’t technically exist. (The Atlantic $)
10 This Starbucks store is entirely 3D-printed The coffee will still taste the same, though. (Fast Company $) + Meet the designers printing houses out of salt and clay. (MIT Technology Review)
Quote of the day
“It went from a Cinderella story to Nightmare on Elm Street.”
—Dan Ives, a Wedbush Securities analyst, tells the Financial Times why Elon Musk’s allegiance to Donald Trump has backfired for his businesses.
One more thing
How a tiny Pacific Island became the global capital of cybercrimeTokelau, a string of three isolated atolls strung out across the Pacific, is so remote that it was the last place on Earth to be connected to the telephone—only in 1997. Just three years later, the islands received a fax with an unlikely business proposal that would change everything.
It was from an early internet entrepreneur from Amsterdam, named Joost Zuurbier. He wanted to manage Tokelau’s country-code top-level domain, or ccTLD—the short string of characters that is tacked onto the end of a URL—in exchange for money.
In the succeeding years, tiny Tokelau became an unlikely internet giant—but not in the way it may have hoped. Until recently, its .tk domain had more users than any other country’s: a staggering 25 million—but the vast majority were spammers, phishers, and cybercriminals.
Now the territory is desperately trying to clean up .tk. Its international standing, and even its sovereignty, may depend on it. Read the full story.
—Jacob Judah
We can still have nice things
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