The $10 Million Bitcoin Roadmap: Eric Yakes Explains The Path
On the newest episode of What Bitcoin Did, Eric Yakes, co-founder of Epoch, a Bitcoin Venture Capital agency, laid out a sweeping—if controversial—thesis for the way Bitcoin may attain $10 million per coin, arguing the asset is powered by a novel mass motion, a shifting geopolitical reserve regime, and an institutional bid that’s nonetheless in its early innings. “Bitcoin goes to be at $10 million in in all probability like seven years,” Yakes stated, including that the market is “all the time and in all places like one main press launch away from an enormous change within the notion of it.”
The Path To $10 Million For Bitcoin
Yakes’ start line is qualitative, not quantitative. In his view, Bitcoin’s defining edge is sociological: “No different asset has a mass motion or a revolution backing it.” He likens the phenomenon to a secular “perennial bid” that exhibits up each time costs weaken—“our personal ‘Fed put,’” as he put it—rooted in conviction consumers who deal with the asset as a political and financial hedge somewhat than a mere commerce. To clarify the sturdiness of such actions, he reached for Eric Hoffer’s traditional The True Believer, arguing Bitcoin has already progressed from “males of phrases” (the cypherpunks) via the “fanatics” who evangelized within the early years and is now coming into a part dominated by “males of motion”—operators and executives consolidating and scaling the motion’s positive aspects.
That cultural shift, he stated, is colliding with a brand new adoption curve. Where the 2017 cycle skewed retail, the present regime is being formed by corporates, asset managers and, more and more, states. Yakes framed Wall Street’s embrace as a story unlock as a lot as a circulate story. He cited BlackRock’s research popularized in the course of the ETF push and stated the agency’s Bitcoin fund grew to become “one of the vital worthwhile merchandise” in brief order.
More broadly, he argued that many wealth managers are shifting from dismissive to neutral-positive, experimenting with 1–2% allocations whereas looking forward to indicators that Bitcoin’s correlation profile durably decouples from danger belongings. “The second we do actually get gold-like traits within the correlation,” he stated, “that’s when that 1–2% turns to 30% fairly rapidly”—a shift he believes would quickly cannibalize gold’s investable market.
Politics, in his telling, is now tailwind somewhat than headwind. Talking about US President Donald Trump and the strategic Bitcoin reserve, Yakes stated that the express presidential help is extra essential than whether or not the federal government truly buys cash. “What’s probably the most highly effective factor that he’s carried out? The signaling,” Yakes stated, arguing that when backing Bitcoin ceases to be reputationally expensive, institutional adoption compounds. He acknowledged criticisms that symbolic gestures should not coverage, however burdened that markets run on narratives: elite endorsement shrinks profession danger, expands the client set and reduces volatility via systematic, rules-based inflows.
The Post-2022 Macro Shift
Yakes’ macro scaffolding is constructed across the post-2022 shift in world reserves. Sanctions danger, he argued, has accelerated a transfer from holding different nations’ liabilities towards holding commodities. He expects official sectors to maintain accumulating gold and, over time, so as to add Bitcoin as a “artificial commodity” with superior portability and seizure resistance—albeit solely after market depth grows. The constraint, he emphasised, is liquidity: sovereigns want to maneuver tens or a whole lot of billions with out insupportable slippage, which implies Bitcoin’s market construction should proceed to thicken earlier than state steadiness sheets can personal it in measurement.
Corporate treasuries are, in his view, a obligatory bridge. Yakes famous {that a} modest shift of money from the most important US corporates—“put 15% of the highest ten’s money into Bitcoin”—may match or exceed spot-ETF demand, with probably outsized value impression as a result of Bitcoin’s provide “doesn’t reply to demand.” The value, he reminded, is about on the margin the place incremental shopping for meets a base of more and more inelastic holders, and “narrative determines” how prepared these holders are to promote at any given degree.
The roadmap additionally runs via banks and stablecoins. Yakes argued that stablecoins have already disintermediated main components of the standard “two-tier” cash system by translating short-duration authorities debt into on-chain {dollars}. He criticized US guidelines that forbid stablecoin issuers from paying curiosity as a ring-fence to guard banks, however predicted a bifurcation between onshore, bank-integrated “tokenized deposits” and offshore stablecoins that compete on yield and reserve composition.
In that aggressive panorama, he expects Bitcoin to penetrate reserve baskets over time—citing Tether’s reported allocation to BTC—as a result of issuers will search “superior risk-adjusted collateral” to out-yield rivals. If customers discover their stablecoin supplier is capturing the Bitcoin upside whereas paying them a decrease yield, he argued, that turns into the Trojan-horse second when folks “flip the swap” and maintain extra native BTC.
Yakes tied this to a nascent, Bitcoin-native “time period construction of rates of interest”—an idea popularized by Nick Batia—rising from Lightning routing charges, liquidity leases and different on-chain funding primitives. He pointed to early datapoints, from single-digit routing yields to increased returns reported by massive nodes in siloed environments, as proof of a growing capital market that treasury corporations and banks will finally faucet. The path of journey, he stated, is evident: “The margins are higher in Bitcoin.” Repealing roadblocks like SAB 121 and green-lighting financial institution custody would speed up that migration.
What Could Go Wrong For Bitcoin?
The interview didn’t dodge dangers. Host Danny Knowles pressed on the prospect that Bitcoin’s financial freedoms get corralled right into a KYC-only, surveillance-heavy regime, leaving a neutered “store-of-value product” managed by a handful of custodians. Yakes conceded the hazard—calling ETF custody focus a “actual factor to observe”—however argued that incentives and sport principle reduce in opposition to long-run cartelization.
Institutions, he stated, face a prisoner’s-dilemma: defecting in favor of the community’s neutrality and the goodwill of node-running customers will usually be extra worthwhile than coordinating to seize it. He returned repeatedly to first ideas: if permissionless world cash is actually the highest-value use case, the most important revenue swimming pools will accrue to those that protect that property, not those that smother it.
On the oft-debated sequence—retailer of worth, medium of trade, unit of account—Yakes rejects the concept that advocates should “make” folks spend Bitcoin right this moment. Money, he stated, emerges as a result of everybody already holds it. As possession diffuses, sellers will start to demand it, and utilization will observe. “It’s changing into this factor the place everyone’s like, ‘I ought to in all probability have a little bit bit of cash in Bitcoin.’ And that’s the way it turns into one thing everyone has,” he stated. At that time, Gresham-like dynamics take over: folks hoard the more durable cash and spend the softer one till counterparties more and more require fee within the more durable kind.
Yakes’ $10 million name rests much less on a single set off than on cumulative, compounding unlocks. He expects correlation shifts to attract bigger portfolio weights from asset managers; company treasuries to widen the client base and thicken two-way markets; stablecoins and financial institution rails to normalize cryptographic settlement whereas quietly seeding Bitcoin into reserves; and geopolitics to push sovereigns towards belongings which can be each impartial and moveable.
The timetable is intentionally daring. But the mechanism, he insisted, is easy: fastened provide, rising legitimacy, broadening distribution and a motion that doesn’t go away. “Everything’s in our favor and nothing’s going to have the ability to cease this,” he stated, including “Bitcoin is one thing that would get to $10 million simply throughout the subsequent 10 years. If I had been to place my cash on it, I’d say Bitcoin goes to be at $10 million in in all probability like seven years. I feel it’s going to occur comparatively quickly.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $115,062.
