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Matthew Sigel, VanEck’s head of digital assets research, put a number on his Bitcoin conviction Wednesday and did not flinch doing it. Speaking on CNBC’s Halftime Report, he told viewers that a seven-figure Bitcoin price is not a bull case or a stretch scenario. It is the base case, and he thinks it arrives within roughly five years.
Bitcoin was trading near $81,000 at the time of the interview, down from a record high above $126,000 reached in October 2025. Getting to one million from here would require the asset to climb more than twelvefold.
Sigel did not appear troubled by the gap.
His argument rests less on charts and more on people. Sigel pointed to the growing appetite among younger investors to allocate to Bitcoin as the structural engine behind the forecast, describing a generational shift in how people think about storing value.
Base case approveD@matthew_sigel https://t.co/3qoqlangzM
— Base Case D (@CashflowingOptn) May 6, 2026
The analogy he reached for was the video game industry, which spent decades as a niche pastime before becoming one of the largest entertainment categories on earth. Bitcoin, he argued, is following a similar arc. People who come to it tend not to leave. The asset class has a retention quality that most traditional markets do not.
He also cited something with no precedent in Bitcoin’s 16-year history: a central bank has now purchased Bitcoin for its reserves. For Sigel, that single fact crosses a threshold. It moves Bitcoin from speculative asset to something with genuine macro legitimacy, the kind of legitimacy that tends to bring more institutional money behind it.
None of that means the ride will be smooth. Sigel was explicit that Bitcoin remains a deeply cyclical asset, that there is no institutional backstop when prices fall, and that sharp drawdowns are simply part of the journey toward seven figures. The base case is the destination. The path, he acknowledged, will test patience.
On near-term price action he flagged that Bitcoin’s correlation with the Nasdaq is at a five-year high, meaning the current recovery is being carried partly by broader market optimism rather than crypto-specific demand. He read the derivatives market as relatively clean, without the speculative excess that has historically marked a top, and said the rally still appears driven largely by short covering rather than aggressive new positioning.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs pulled in over $2.4 billion in April 2026, the strongest month of inflows since the late-2025 peak, suggesting institutional appetite has not dried up despite the significant price pullback from that high.
VanEck is not alone in saying the number out loud. Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan made a similar call last month. ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood has a base case of $710,000 by 2030 and a bull case of $1.5 million.
The prediction represents a significant internal revision at VanEck too, whose own CEO had set a $300,000 target as recently as 2024.
The skeptics have not gone quiet. Economist Ray Dalio has acknowledged Bitcoin could function as a store of value but has repeatedly questioned whether it can realistically scale into a global reserve asset, citing regulatory risk and the tendency of sovereign governments to resist any challenge to monetary control. Others like Peter Schiff argue that Bitcoin’s price has always been driven more by narrative and momentum than by any underlying cash flow or fundamental anchor.
There is also a conflict of interest question that is hard to ignore. VanEck runs multiple Bitcoin-related investment products. Firms in that position benefit directly when prices rise and when retail and institutional investors grow more confident about the asset’s long-term trajectory. The bull and the product seller are, in this case, the same person.
Prediction markets reflected the uncertainty on the ground. Odds on Bitcoin simply returning to $100,000 this year were roughly even, suggesting the market is far from pricing in the kind of sustained climb Sigel is describing.
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