ARK Invest's Wood backs Bitcoin over AI as 'insurance policy' for global wealth

ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood has stated that Bitcoin stands apart from the artificial intelligence trade because it offers protection against sovereign currency risk, something no tech stock can offer.

“Capital outflows from less stable countries around the world will light another fire under bitcoin and other digital assets,” Wood wrote on X on June 27.

She acknowledged that AI “has launched a technology revolution, deservedly sucking a lot of oxygen out of the investment world,” but added that it “cannot serve as the insurance policy” that Bitcoin provides.

How much hold does AI have in capital markets?

Wood is not the only voice drawing a line between the two asset classes. BlackRock’s head of digital assets, Robbie Mitchnick, said in a June 22 interview that Bitcoin’s weak performance since October 2025 is not in isolation, as everything outside AI trade has also suffered. According to Mitchnick, it is not a crypto-specific problem.

“It’s been a tough stretch for Bitcoin since last October for all of crypto, and that’s consistent in many ways with just about everything that is not AI-centric,” Mitchnick said in an interview. He described the AI boom as “certainly sucking a lot of the oxygen out of the room.”

Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan recently called crypto a “contrarian bet” now that institutional capital has shifted toward AI stocks, robotics firms, and SpaceX. “Who needs crypto when the Nasdaq-100 is up 43% year-over-year?” he wrote.

Bitcoin trades around $60,000 as of June 27, which is a decline of over 50% from the all-time high of above $125,000 reached last October.

U.S.-listed spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded more than 45 consecutive days of outflows totaling $7.8 billion, according to Cryptopolitan’s earlier reporting.

While these bleak numbers are coming out, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, AI-linked semiconductor stocks from Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom, and Marvell have all outperformed Bitcoin on a year-to-date basis.

Are crypto miners ditching crypto for AI?

The capital flight extends beyond trading desks, as miners have also been pivoting to AI infrastructure services in droves. 

Bitcoin’s network hashrate fell from a peak of 1.151 zetahashes per second in October 2025 to roughly 0.888 zetahashes per second.

A report from late March found that listed miners could derive as much as 70% of their revenue from AI infrastructure by the end of 2026, up from about 30% at the start of the year.

In a mid-year update, Fidelity Digital Assets described the dynamic as “structural retooling,” noting that miners appear to be redirecting power and infrastructure toward higher-margin AI data center workloads. 

The 30-day average hashrate and mining difficulty both dropped roughly 8% to 9% from earlier highs before partially recovering.

The Bitcoin difficulty adjustment that occurred on June 14 was the 11th largest downward adjustment in the network’s history, according to Galaxy Research.

Is a Bitcoin bull run ahead or a pipe dream?

Despite the pressure, several institutional voices say that the pendulum of investments will swing back to crypto.

Mitchnick identified rising U.S. government debt and deficits as “ultimately the most important fundamental driver ahead” for Bitcoin, predicting the issue could resurface around the 2026 midterm elections.

BlackRock itself recommended a 1% to 2% Bitcoin portfolio allocation on June 23, calling the asset a “complementary diversifier.”

For Hougan at Bitwise, the bear market may be closer to its end than its beginning. Hougan wrote, “When crypto stops being a momentum trade, fundamentals start to matter, and this rotation is proof it’s already underway.”

In her post, Wood stated that AI creates wealth, but it cannot serve as an insurance policy to protect it.

If capital flight from weaker currencies goes up, or if U.S. fiscal policy triggers inflation fears, Bitcoin’s value proposition as a non-sovereign store of value becomes harder for allocators to ignore, regardless of how many AI chips Nvidia sells.

How this plays out in the future remains to be seen.

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