Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan has argued that bitcoin's price action during the active Iran conflict is the most important behavioural signal the asset has produced in years, and that it justifies adding a fresh million-dollar increment on top of his firm's long-running 10-year price target.
Speaking on the Crypto Nutshell channel, Hougan said the textbook reaction for a risk asset during an unresolved geopolitical conflict is to sell off as investors rotate into dollars and Treasuries. Bitcoin did the opposite.
"I think it's extraordinarily bullish for the long-term trajectory of bitcoin that it's performed so well during this conflict," Hougan said. "I've always thought of bitcoin as two things. It's a store of value like gold, and then it has effectively an out-of-the-money call option on becoming a tool for international commerce, a way for countries to settle transactions using an apolitical rail. But it's been an out-of-the-money call option because for most of bitcoin's history, that just seemed really unlikely."
Hougan said the Iran conflict, in which a sanctioned economy publicly pointed at bitcoin as a possible workaround to dollar settlement, is the closest the market has come to seeing that call option start to price in.
"Until the Russia-Ukraine war started, we were in a dollar-only world. Since then, it's been basically dollar-yuan. That's been the settlement rails. But what we saw in Iran is a country sort of point towards bitcoin as a potential solution," he said. "Now there are all sorts of reasons to be concerned about that from sanctions and money laundering. There are things for us to focus on. But what it shows is that the increasingly fractious world and the increasing changes to the global monetary order have opened up a space for bitcoin."
The price implication, in Hougan's framework, is mechanical. Bitwise's existing long-term capital market assumptions point to a $1.3 million bitcoin price by 2035 on the basis of bitcoin growing its share of the global store-of-value market from roughly 6% today to 15-17%, in line with two decades of 12% annual growth in that market.
"If bitcoin could be both a store of value and an actual currency, then the price targets we've been talking about — and at Bitwise we've been talking about $1.3 million by 2035 — I think you have to ratchet that up maybe another million-dollar increment because that's a huge addressable market," he said. "I think it's directly the reason we've been rallying through this Iran conflict, and it makes me very optimistic long-term for where bitcoin is headed."
Hougan's framing leans heavily on a recurring metaphor: that crisis events are the only mechanism by which bitcoin breaks into use cases otherwise sealed off by dollar dominance. He cited the 2022 Canadian trucker convoy financial-censorship episode and the current Iran conflict as the two pivotal moments.
"In a normal status quo, there is no opportunity for bitcoin to break into this exclusive club of the dollar and the yuan being the settlement rails. But when you get these shock moments, like the Canadian trucker strike, like this challenging geopolitical event that exists between the US and China — literally in the middle from a geographic perspective — that's what opens things up," Hougan said. "My piece was called 'chaos is a ladder' because you need those events to make space for bitcoin to wedge its way into the conversation."
He extended the same argument to onchain trading infrastructure, pointing to Hyperliquid as a venue that has benefitted from the same mechanic. The Iran conflict began on a Saturday with traditional CME futures markets closed, and Hougan said institutional macro funds had little choice but to onboard to decentralised venues.
"You can't be a global macro hedge fund or a leading investor and not be able to respond to geopolitical events on Saturday. And right now Hyperliquid is basically the only game in town," he said. "So they're being forced to onboard into this ecosystem."
Hougan stopped short of being unconditional on Washington outcomes. Asked about the prospects of the Clarity Act passing before the US midterms, he said the recent flow of rumours had been more positive than he had expected but warned against counting unhatched chickens.
"I'm hopeful. I'm not bullish on anything in Washington, and everything can break, but the most recent spat of rumours has been more positive than I expected," he said. "So put me down as hopeful, but you always have to treat DC with a bit of scepticism. I wouldn't count those chickens until they're fully hatched and indeed signed into law."
The Crypto Nutshell host pushed back on parts of the thesis, noting that bitcoin has also lived through crises — the Terra collapse, the FTX implosion and multiple 70%-plus drawdowns — that did not translate into structural adoption. The distinction Hougan is drawing, the host argued, is between crypto-native blowups and macro shocks that force institutional infrastructure changes. The latter, in this reading, is the version of the argument that holds up under scrutiny.