- Jefferies’ Christopher Wood removed bitcoin after five years at a 5%–10% weight, saying the price likely peaked near $126,000 and liquidity weakened in 2025.
- He flags quantum risk from CRQCs that could access up to 10 million coins, and swaps the stake into 45% gold and 25% miners, with 30% in Asian equities ex-Japan.
A prominent Wall Street analyst is walking away from bitcoin and turning decisively toward gold, raising new questions about how durable the flagship cryptocurrency really is as a long-term store of value. Christopher Wood, global head of equity strategy at Jefferies and a longtime crypto advocate, has removed bitcoin from his firm’s long-term model portfolio after keeping it at roughly a 5%–10% allocation for the past five years. His shift centers on a view that bitcoin already peaked at $126,000 in the last post-halving cycle and now faces an emerging existential risk from quantum computing that he believes long-horizon investors can no longer ignore.
Who cut bitcoin after a five-year allocation
The Wall Street analyst behind this move, Christopher Wood, has built a reputation as one of the more constructive institutional voices on digital assets, which makes his reversal especially notable in the current market. For half a decade, his Jefferies model portfolio treated bitcoin as a strategic holding, with its share fluctuating between 5% and 10% amid the token’s sharp bull and bear cycles. That stance helped validate bitcoin’s role among some traditional investors who looked for diversification away from fiat currencies and low-yielding bonds. Wood now argues that the price cycle reached an important inflection in the last halving period, when bitcoin ran to what he sees as a terminal peak of $126,000 in 2024, before sliding into a bear market in late 2025. He links that downturn not only to broader risk-off sentiment but also to fragile liquidity and stress tied to the yen-carry trade, which amplified volatility across multiple asset classes at the time. In his note, the Wall Street analyst stresses that this is not merely a tactical de-risking after a sharp rally but a structural re-assessment of bitcoin’s role in a long-term pension-style portfolio, where capital must stay protected over decades rather than a few market cycles.
Wall Street analyst raises quantum computing as an existential threat to bitcoin
The core reason this Wall Street analyst cites for abandoning bitcoin is not only price performance but a technology risk he believes the market underestimates. Wood points to the rise of cryptographically relevant quantum computers, often shortened to CRQCs, as a direct challenge to the cryptography that underpins bitcoin ownership and transaction security. Today’s classical supercomputers would need “trillions of years” to derive a private key from a corresponding public key under current standards, which makes the network effectively secure in practice. Wood argues that once CRQCs arrive, that timeframe could collapse to several hours or several days, turning an intractable problem into a realistic attack window for an adversary. In his view, that shift would undermine the entire store-of-value story that persuaded many institutions to treat bitcoin as a form of digital gold. The Wall Street analyst references a report from ChainCode Labs that estimates up to 10 million coins, roughly 50% of all bitcoin in circulation, could be vulnerable once a capable CRQC goes online and can target unspent outputs whose public keys are already exposed. Those tokens, often called “vulnerable coins,” include early mined holdings and long-dormant wallets that never moved after initial receipt, making them attractive targets if an attacker can reconstruct private keys. Some developers and investors have floated drastic ideas such as burning vulnerable coins to protect the network, but Wood notes that such measures would be controversial and could damage trust in bitcoin’s fixed-supply narrative. He clarifies that he does not expect quantum risk to crash bitcoin in the near term, since practical CRQCs do not exist yet, and research timelines remain uncertain. Still, the Wall Street analyst insists that a long-dated pension portfolio must consider risks over several decades, not just the next five years, and he believes quantum computing already weakens bitcoin’s claim to be a permanent, stress-tested store of value.
How the Wall Street analyst rebuilt his model portfolio with gold and miners
With bitcoin removed, the Wall Street analyst has restructured his model portfolio around gold and gold mining equities, arguing that the metal has passed far more real-world stress tests than any digital asset. Wood increased the allocation to physical gold to 45% and set gold mining stocks at 25%, creating a combined 70% exposure to the yellow metal and its production chain. He left the remaining 30% in Asian equities excluding Japan, maintaining his longstanding conviction on the region’s growth prospects while still prioritizing capital preservation. This means the previous 5%–10% bitcoin weight is gone and effectively replaced by a 10% extra commitment spread across bullion and miners. The Wall Street analyst explains that this heavy tilt reflects both macro and structural considerations.
On the macro side, gold just posted its best yearly performance since 1979 in 2025 and now trades near record highs, boosted by persistent geopolitical tensions and ongoing inflation worries that erode real returns in cash and bonds. On the structural side, gold does not depend on public-key cryptography, private keys, or decentralized consensus rules that might break under a quantum breakthrough. In his note, Wood calls gold the “historically stress tested store of value” and argues that, unlike bitcoin, it has already survived wars, regime changes, financial crises, and currency devaluations. He adds that gold remains one of the few reliable hedges, if not the only one, against escalating geopolitical risk in a world where traditional safe havens such as sovereign bonds can suffer from rising debt loads and policy uncertainty. The Wall Street analyst also sees upside in gold miners, which can offer operational leverage to the metal’s price, though they carry company-specific risks, cost pressures, and regulatory constraints. He believes that in a scenario where investors steadily rotate toward hard assets and hedges, miners will benefit from stronger cash flows and improved balance sheets, justifying a quarter of the portfolio.
What the Wall Street analyst shift signals for bitcoin, gold, and institutional sentiment
The decision by a senior Wall Street analyst to abandon bitcoin after years of support highlights a maturing debate around digital assets, quantum security, and long-term portfolio design. Bitcoin still has backers who argue that the network can migrate to quantum-resistant signatures and that developers will deploy new cryptographic schemes before any CRQC emerges with enough qubits and error correction to threaten keys in practice. Some see Wood’s stance as too cautious or as underestimating the pace of protocol innovation that has already occurred during prior upgrade cycles. Yet his move captures the mindset of many institutional allocators who must weigh not only potential upside but also low-probability, high-impact risks that could materialize over multi-decade horizons. In the near term, the Wall Street analyst does not predict a collapse in bitcoin’s price driven directly by quantum fears; instead he views the recent bear market as mainly a function of risk-off flows, weak liquidity, and spillovers from leveraged strategies such as the yen-carry trade. Even so, he argues that perception matters as much as current reality in capital markets, and he expects ongoing discussion of quantum threats to erode some of the confidence that once underpinned bitcoin’s digital gold narrative. At the same time, the strong 2025 rally in gold, its best since 1979, has reinforced its appeal to cautious investors who want a hedge against both inflation and conflict. The Wall Street analyst thinks that the contrast between a centuries-old, physically scarce asset and a relatively young, code-based monetary network will grow sharper as quantum research advances and as more reports quantify how many coins could become vulnerable. His portfolio now expresses a clear judgment: for very long-term capital, he sees gold and gold mining stocks as better suited than bitcoin to guard against both technological disruption and rising geopolitical stress. That does not end the broader debate over digital assets, but it shows how one influential Wall Street analyst has already chosen sides in the evolving contest between bitcoin and gold.
Conclusion
The shift by a leading Wall Street analyst from bitcoin to gold underscores a changing risk calculus in institutional portfolios, as quantum computing moves from theoretical concept to a factor in long-horizon planning. By removing a 5%–10% bitcoin stake that had sat in his model for five years and ramping exposure to physical gold and gold miners to a combined 70%, Christopher Wood signals that he no longer views the cryptocurrency as a dependable store of value for pensions and similar investors. His argument rests on specific numbers and scenarios, from the $126,000 peak in the last post-halving cycle to estimates that CRQCs could access up to 10 million vulnerable coins, or around half of the supply, if key-breaking becomes practical within hours or days. As quantum research progresses and macro tensions persist, more asset managers may face the same questions this Wall Street analyst has already answered: whether to treat bitcoin as a tactical trading instrument or to entrust long-term savings to an asset whose security model could face an unprecedented technological test. For now, his decision places gold, with its 1979-style performance revival and long history under stress, back at the center of his defensive strategy, and it adds a new dimension to the ongoing comparison between digital and traditional stores of value.
Disclaimer
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