Cathie Wood, founder and CEO of Ark Investment Management, which manages more than $50 billion in assets, said that she’s keeping an eye on the explosive growth of non-fungible tokens, or NFTs, though she doesn’t hold any.
In the SALT conference held by alternative-asset manager SkyBridge on Monday, Wood talked about her favor for Async Art, an NFT platform that allows users to buy pixels for digital artworks and create layers on them.
“I was walking when I heard the CEO tell his story, and my smile went ear to ear, because I said: ‘Man, this is gonna be so explosive,’” Wood said in a panel with CNBC anchor Andrew Ross Sorkin. “This is how I felt when the internet first came about.” However, Wood said she currently doesn’t hold any NFTs.
Meanwhile, Wood said she expects bitcoin’s BTCUSD, +2.94% price to top $500,000 in the next five years. “If we’re right, and companies continue to diversify their cash into something like crypto, and institutional investors start allocating 5% of their funds toward crypto…We believe that [bitcoin’s] price will be tenfold of where it is today,” she said. Bitcoin was recently trading at $44,993, down 1.2% over the past 24 hours.
Wood also said her confidence in ether ETCUSD, +0.82% “has gone up dramatically,” as the blockchain starts its transition from proof-of-work to proof-of-stake. Ether was trading at $3,294, down 2.8% over the past 24 hours.
When asked by Sorkin what her picks are, if only investing in one cryptocurrency, Wood said she would allocate 60% to bitcoin and 40% to ether.
A SEC filing on Friday revealed that Ark Investment is allowing one of its funds ARKW, -0.92% to invest in Canadian Bitcoin ETFs.
Ark Investment has helped create a bitcoin exchange-traded fund with 21Shares, while the SEC has yet to approve any bitcoin ETFs.