The consensus that Bitcoin has matured into “digital gold” faces a new boundary on Wall Street. It has little to do with day-to-day price fluctuations and everything to do with the distant future of computing.
Two prominent strategists named Wood are currently offering diametrically opposed roadmaps to the world’s largest global allocator of crypto assets.
On January 16, Jefferies’ Christopher Wood eliminated the firm’s long-standing exposure to Bitcoin, citing the existential threat posed by quantum computing.
Meanwhile, ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood urges investors to ignore the technical concerns and focus on the asset’s apparent lack of correlation with traditional markets.
This divergence highlights an important evolution in how institutional investors will underwrite crypto assets in 2026. The debate is no longer just about whether Bitcoin is a speculative token or a store of value.
We’ve moved into more complex calculations around viability, governance, and the specific types of hedges that investors believe they’re buying.
quantum exit
Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies, built a reputation for manipulating market sentiment with his newsletter Greed & Fear.
His latest move is to completely remove the 10% Bitcoin allocation from his model portfolio, significantly reducing two years of institutional accumulation.
In the reallocation, Jefferies moved 10% of its Bitcoin sleeve into assets with old stories, 5% into physical gold and 5% into gold mining stocks.
This rationale is rooted in tail risk rather than immediate market trends. Wood argued that advances in quantum computing could eventually undermine the encryption that protects the Bitcoin network.
While most investors still base their accusations of quantum threats on “science projects,” Jefferies treats that possibility as a disqualifier for annuity-style long-term capital.
This fear is being validated among technology experts who argue that the threat timeline is compressing faster than the market realizes.
Charles Edwards, founder of Capriol, claimed that quantum computers could beat Bitcoin in just 2-9 years without upgrades, and with a high probability in the 4-5 year range.
Edwards describes the market as entering a “quantum event horizon.” This is a critical threshold where the frontier risk of hacking is approximately equal to the time required to reach consensus on the upgrade and perform the rollout.
In Jeffries’ framework, the premise of a quantum computer’s security is based on cryptographic primitives that are vulnerable to future powerful machines, so the unpleasant reality is that a quantum computer will one day be able to crack Bitcoin.
Specific threats include an attacker “harvesting” and storing the exposed public key now and decrypting the private key once the hardware has matured.
Estimates suggest that more than 4 million BTC are held in vulnerable addresses due to reuse or outdated formats. This leaves a “harvest now, decrypt later” attack vector that can potentially compromise a large portion of the total supply.
Quantum computing is not an immediate threat to Bitcoin
Grayscale, one of the largest digital asset managers, is trying to ground the market discussion in 2026 by labeling quantum vulnerabilities as this year’s “red red herring.”
The analysis suggests that while the threat is real, it is unlikely to drive prices higher in the short term.
Considering this, Grayscale argued that in the long term, most blockchains and much of the broader economy will need post-quantum upgrades anyway.
This view is consistent with developments within the crypto sector.
Andre Dragosch, head of research at Bitwise Europe, also refuted the theory of “imminent doom” by highlighting the huge computational gap between current technology and viable attacks.
While justifying concerns about older wallets, Dragosh maintains that the network itself is still very robust.
He wrote:
“Bitcoin is currently running at one zetahash per second, which is the equivalent of over a million El Capitan-class supercomputers. This is an order of magnitude beyond the reach of today’s quantum machines, and even more than is expected in the foreseeable future.”
In the case of Bitcoin
Considering the above, ARK Invest further strengthens the case that Bitcoin belongs in a modern portfolio precisely because it behaves differently than others.
In her 2026 outlook note, ARK’s Cathie Wood focused on correlations, not ideology.
Her arguments are clinical. Bitcoin’s income stream has remained less correlated with major asset classes since 2020, thus offering a way to improve portfolio efficiency.
ARK supported this view with a correlation matrix using weekly returns from January 2020 to January 2026. The data shows that Bitcoin has a correlation of 0.14 with gold and 0.06 with bonds.
Perhaps most surprising, this table shows that the correlation between the S&P 500 and bonds is higher than the correlation between Bitcoin and gold.
Wood uses this data to argue that Bitcoin should be seen as a valuable diversifier for asset allocators seeking higher returns per unit of risk in the coming years.
This represents a subtle but important shift in messaging. ARK is reconfiguring Bitcoin from a “new version of gold” to an “uncorrelated return stream with asymmetric upside.”
Redefining hedging
For investors following the split between two of the market’s most prominent strategists, what’s immediately clear is that Bitcoin isn’t broken. It is that the institutional narrative is maturing into a more demanding one.
Jefferies is effectively saying that hedging, which may require controversial protocol-level transitions, is not the same as physical gold, even though both assets can rise in the same macro regime.
This is because gold does not require adjustments, upgrades, or governance to remain a valid asset. Bitcoin, on the other hand, is a hedge that ultimately depends on its ability to adapt.
The counterargument is that traditional finance faces more of a short-term crisis from quantum computing than from Bitcoin.
Dragosh said:
“Banks rely heavily on long-lived RSA/ECC keys for authentication and interbank communications. If quantum machines can break these, it will enable coordinated attacks much faster than any real threat to Bitcoin’s decentralized architecture.”
With this in mind, ARK is effectively saying that portfolio diversification benefits can justify a BTC position, even if the asset is still in its infancy.
The question at stake in these cases is therefore whether Bitcoin can reliably orchestrate a post-quantum transition without disrupting the social consensus that gives it monetary value.