On the latest episode of What Bitcoin Did, Eric Yakes, co-founder of Epoch, a Bitcoin Venture Capital firm, laid out a sweeping—if controversial—thesis for how Bitcoin could reach $10 million per coin, arguing the asset is powered by a unique mass movement, a shifting geopolitical reserve regime, and an institutional bid that is still in its early innings. “Bitcoin is going to be at $10 million in probably like seven years,” Yakes said, adding that the market is “always and everywhere like one major press release away from a huge change in the perception of it.”
The Path To $10 Million For Bitcoin
Yakes’ starting point is qualitative, not quantitative. In his view, Bitcoin’s defining edge is sociological: “No other asset has a mass movement or a revolution backing it.” He likens the phenomenon to a secular “perennial bid” that shows up whenever prices weaken—“our own ‘Fed put,’” as he put it—rooted in conviction buyers who treat the asset as a political and monetary hedge rather than a mere trade. To explain the durability of such movements, he reached for Eric Hoffer’s classic The True Believer, arguing Bitcoin has already progressed from “men of words” (the cypherpunks) through the “fanatics” who evangelized in the early years and is now entering a phase dominated by “men of action”—operators and executives consolidating and scaling the movement’s gains.
That cultural shift, he said, is colliding with a new adoption curve. Where the 2017 cycle skewed retail, the current regime is being shaped by corporates, asset managers and, increasingly, states. Yakes framed Wall Street’s embrace as a narrative unlock as much as a flow story. He cited BlackRock’s research popularized during the ETF push and said the firm’s Bitcoin fund became “one of the most profitable products” in short order.
More broadly, he argued that many wealth managers are moving from dismissive to neutral-positive, experimenting with 1–2% allocations while watching for signs that Bitcoin’s correlation profile durably decouples from risk assets. “The second we do really get gold-like characteristics in the correlation,” he said, “that’s when that 1–2% turns to 30% pretty quickly”—a shift he believes would rapidly cannibalize gold’s investable market.
Politics, in his telling, is now tailwind rather than headwind. Talking about US President Donald Trump and the strategic Bitcoin reserve, Yakes said that the explicit presidential support is more important than whether the government actually buys coins. “What’s the most powerful thing that he’s done? The signaling,” Yakes said, arguing that once backing Bitcoin ceases to be reputationally costly, institutional adoption compounds. He acknowledged criticisms that symbolic gestures are not policy, but stressed that markets run on narratives: elite endorsement shrinks career risk, expands the buyer set and reduces volatility through systematic, rules-based inflows.
The Post-2022 Macro Shift
Yakes’ macro scaffolding is built around the post-2022 shift in global reserves. Sanctions risk, he argued, has accelerated a move from holding other nations’ liabilities toward holding commodities. He expects official sectors to keep accumulating gold and, over time, to add Bitcoin as a “synthetic commodity” with superior portability and seizure resistance—albeit only after market depth grows. The constraint, he emphasized, is liquidity: sovereigns need to move tens or hundreds of billions without intolerable slippage, which means Bitcoin’s market structure must continue to thicken before state balance sheets can own it in size.
Corporate treasuries are, in his view, a necessary bridge. Yakes noted that a modest shift of cash from the largest US corporates—“put 15% of the top ten’s cash into Bitcoin”—could match or exceed spot-ETF demand, with potentially outsized price impact because Bitcoin’s supply “doesn’t respond to demand.” The price, he reminded, is set at the margin where incremental buying meets a base of increasingly inelastic holders, and “narrative determines” how willing those holders are to sell at any given level.
The roadmap also runs through banks and stablecoins. Yakes argued that stablecoins have already disintermediated major parts of the traditional “two-tier” money system by translating short-duration government debt into on-chain dollars. He criticized US rules that forbid stablecoin issuers from paying interest as a ring-fence to protect banks, but predicted a bifurcation between onshore, bank-integrated “tokenized deposits” and offshore stablecoins that compete on yield and reserve composition.
In that competitive landscape, he expects Bitcoin to penetrate reserve baskets over time—citing Tether’s reported allocation to BTC—because issuers will seek “superior risk-adjusted collateral” to out-yield rivals. If users notice their stablecoin provider is capturing the Bitcoin upside while paying them a lower yield, he argued, that becomes the Trojan-horse moment when people “flip the switch” and hold more native BTC.
Yakes tied this to a nascent, Bitcoin-native “term structure of interest rates”—a concept popularized by Nick Batia—emerging from Lightning routing fees, liquidity leases and other on-chain funding primitives. He pointed to early datapoints, from single-digit routing yields to higher returns reported by large nodes in siloed environments, as evidence of a developing capital market that treasury companies and banks will eventually tap. The direction of travel, he said, is clear: “The margins are better in Bitcoin.” Repealing roadblocks like SAB 121 and green-lighting bank custody would accelerate that migration.
What Could Go Wrong For Bitcoin?
The interview did not dodge risks. Host Danny Knowles pressed on the prospect that Bitcoin’s monetary freedoms get corralled into a KYC-only, surveillance-heavy regime, leaving a neutered “store-of-value product” managed by a handful of custodians. Yakes conceded the danger—calling ETF custody concentration a “real thing to monitor”—but argued that incentives and game theory cut against long-run cartelization.
Institutions, he said, face a prisoner’s-dilemma: defecting in favor of the network’s neutrality and the goodwill of node-running users will often be more profitable than coordinating to capture it. He returned repeatedly to first principles: if permissionless global money is in fact the highest-value use case, the largest profit pools will accrue to those who preserve that property, not those who smother it.
On the oft-debated sequence—store of value, medium of exchange, unit of account—Yakes rejects the idea that advocates must “make” people spend Bitcoin today. Money, he said, emerges because everyone already holds it. As ownership diffuses, sellers will begin to demand it, and usage will follow. “It’s becoming this thing where everybody’s like, ‘I should probably have a little bit of money in Bitcoin.’ And that’s how it becomes something everybody has,” he said. At that point, Gresham-like dynamics take over: people hoard the harder money and spend the softer one until counterparties increasingly require payment in the harder form.
Yakes’ $10 million call rests less on a single trigger than on cumulative, compounding unlocks. He expects correlation shifts to draw larger portfolio weights from asset managers; corporate treasuries to widen the buyer base and thicken two-way markets; stablecoins and bank rails to normalize cryptographic settlement while quietly seeding Bitcoin into reserves; and geopolitics to push sovereigns toward assets that are both neutral and portable.
The timetable is deliberately bold. But the mechanism, he insisted, is straightforward: fixed supply, rising legitimacy, broadening distribution and a movement that does not go away. “Everything’s in our favor and nothing’s going to be able to stop this,” he said, adding “Bitcoin is something that could get to $10 million easily within the next 10 years. If I were to put my money on it, I’d say Bitcoin is going to be at $10 million in probably like seven years. I think it’s going to happen relatively rapidly.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $115,062.
