In a recent interview with Scott Melker, Jan van Eck, the CEO of VanEck, mentioned that it might take around ten years for traditional finance (TradFi) to play a role in pushing Bitcoin's market cap to $7.85 trillion, considering that the current market cap of gold stands at roughly $15.7 trillion. In comparison, Bitcoin's market cap is currently around $1.36 trillion.
“I say [Bitcoin will] eventually become at least half the market cap of gold. So I think that takes another five or 10 years. Our TradFi clients are still very confused by Bitcoin, and they don’t want to talk about it, but their clients make them talk about it. So we have a long ways to go. And also buying activities is not helpful. They want to buy it at the tops and then it’s going to go to zero at the bottom. And so they’re bad at allocating…
In the United States, there are a lot of firms, obviously in Europe as well, that allocate people’s portfolios for them. And so my hope is those allocators will be open-minded enough to consider gold or Bitcoin at the right time in the cycle and disciplined to take advantage of those trends for their clients, because I kind of give up that the end clients will get it.”
Furthermore, he is of the opinion that investors from countries other than the United States are showing a growing interest in owning Bitcoin due to its independence from the oversight of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT).
“Investors outside the United States increasingly don’t want to be tied into SWIFT, in the US financial system and the political control that comes with it.”