Ark Invest Cathie Wood is Bullish on ETH as Proof-of-Stake Transition Nears

Ark Invest’s Cathie Wood doubled down on her crypto convictions at the recent SALT conference in New York, sharing price predictions and a renewed enthusiasm for ether. 

Wood said her firm is keeping an eye on ether, saying that “Our confidence in ether has gone up dramatically as we’ve seen the beginning of this transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake.”

While Ark doesn’t own any NFTs, according to Wood, she said that the explosive growth in use of Ethereum thanks to NFTs is bringing new investment opportunities.

“Ether is seeing an explosion in developer activity thanks to NFTs and DeFi,” she said on stage. “I’m fascinated with what’s going on in DeFi, which is collapsing the cost of the infrastructure for financial services in a way that I know that the traditional financial industry does not appreciate right now.”

Picking favorites

According to 13F filings, Ark Investment Management is the largest holder of Grayscale’s Ethereum trust holding approximately $16.1 million in shares. 

Aside from ether, Wood is still quite bullish on bitcoin predicting prices to possibly hit the six-figure range. 

“We believe the price will be tenfold what it is today. Instead of $45,000, over $500,000,” Wood said on stage. But, that requires “companies to continue to diversify their cash into something like bitcoin, and institutional investors start allocating 5% of their funds in bitcoin,” she added.  

When asked what crypto she’d hold if she only could pick one, she responded that answering that question is becoming “harder and harder” but she’d still probably pick bitcoin. 

“I think I’d still default to bitcoin because countries are now deeming it legal tender and we haven’t even put that into our thinking,” she said. 

Ark holds about $284.9 million of shares of Grayscale’s Bitcoin Trust, and it makes up approximately 5.5% of the ARK Next Generation Internet ETF.

However, according to a recent filing from Ark, the fund is now able to hold “exchange-traded funds domiciled in Canada.” This comes as the SEC continues to delay approval of a bitcoin ETF, with many investors looking north to Toronto — which first listed bitcoin ETFs earlier this year — instead. Given this competition for investment-grade bitcoin products, the GBTC discount continues to trade in the double-digits hitting -15% Monday.
The price of bitcoin is currently at $46,794, up 5%, according to CoinGecko.

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