In a wide-ranging interview with Anthony Pompliano published on October 2, Jeff Park, partner and Chief Investing Officer at ProCap BTC, argued that gold’s surging price and shifting global ownership patterns are not a threat to Bitcoin—but potentially the catalyst for its next structural leg higher. Park’s thesis centers on flows, geopolitics, and balance-sheet mechanics: if policymakers and large allocators learn to tap the paper gains embedded in sovereign gold holdings, they could redirect a meaningful slice of that liquidity into Bitcoin and ignite what he repeatedly framed as a supercycle.
Why Gold’s Rally May Trigger A Bitcoin Supercycle
“The math is pretty simple,” Park said. “What if we find a way to unlock the ability to build leverage on the paper gains of gold to take a call option on Bitcoin? There’s something incredible here that could happen.” In his back-of-the-envelope scenario, “a trillion dollars of Bitcoin is actually hugely impactful for the bitcoin market.” He contrasted the magnitude of such an impulse with the size of the US fiscal problem, suggesting that while a trillion dollars is small relative to public debt, it would be outsized in a young asset with finite supply and thin free float.
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Park’s remarks were prompted by a simple question: why is gold ripping while Bitcoin has lagged on a relative basis? He did not dispute gold’s leadership—calling it “the story of the year”—but argued the drivers differ. Gold is presently the venue for acute geopolitical expression and central-bank rebalancing, while Bitcoin’s adoption curve hinges on institutional flows that are still ramping. “Ultimately [these markets] are driven by flows,” he said, adding that Bitcoin’s flows are “inevitable” so long as the institutional agenda advances with “focused deliberation.”
A crucial plank of Park’s framework is the changing geography of gold. He pointed to two simultaneous realities: the headline that US gold reserves have reached a large notional value because of price—and the under-discussed fact that the US share of global official gold has sunk over decades. “At one point post-World War II the US had over 50% of the world’s global gold reserve supply as a central bank and now it’s less than 20%. So who’s making up for the compensation on their side? Likely China and many other BRIC countries in the lead.” That shift, Park argued, helps explain the persistence of gold’s bid.
China, in his telling, is exerting influence not only through accumulation but also by building market infrastructure. He highlighted “the launch of the Shanghai Gold Exchange” and the rise of “the Shanghai Futures Exchange,” observing that “physical gold now actually trades in China” at a scale once associated with London. In a symbolic move earlier this year, “for the first time [they] opened up vaults in Hong Kong to allow offshore investors to put their gold in reserves,” a step Park sees as part of a longer-term strategy to enhance the creditworthiness of CNY-settled commodity trade.
Will The US Act First?
Park then connected this gold realignment to Bitcoin’s addressable demand. He referred to the scenario in which the US takes the massive unrealized gains on its gold if marked at market and either revalues or borrows against those gains to purchase Bitcoin for its strategic reserve under President Donald Trump. “Gold has been marked at the Treasury at $42 an ounce and we all know right now it’s trading at [roughly] 3850… There’s a trillion dollars of basically paper gains.” In that context, he argued that leveraging paper gains into a scarce digital reserve asset could be a high-beta upgrade to the sovereign balance sheet.
Pressed on the political feasibility, Park distinguished between executive action and legislation. “The executive path is a great starting point to create a watershed moment,” he said, but “no democratic coalition is truly bought in until a legislative motion.” The former could demonstrate intent; the latter would make a Bitcoin reserve strategy “irreversible” and align it with the broader social mandate he associates with sound-money adoption.
The crux of his “supercycle” framing is compounding. Park walked through return profiles to quantify why a large base allocation, even if financed, could matter over time. “If you own Bitcoin and you assume that it’s going to go up by 12% a year, you’ll make a 30x in 30 years… If you think it’s actually going to go up by 40% per year, which is what the [asset] has been otherwise annualizing, it’s 10 years.” He stressed that the point is not to promise those numbers, but to illustrate how modest annualized returns can cover meaningful fiscal gaps when the base is large enough and the asset is credibly scarce.
Why Is Bitcoin Lagging Gold?
Park also addressed why Bitcoin has not matched gold’s recent pace. Part of the answer, he suggested, is optics: Bitcoin is “living, breathing software” that evolves via open debate, whereas gold’s appeal is its millennia-long immutability. The transparency of Bitcoin’s governance can spook newcomers who only see the noise. “If I were outside and I was a BlackRock ETF buyer and I listened to the conversation that’s happening between the Bitcoin developers, I might say, ‘Hold on a second. This is crazy stuff.’” Even so, he framed current developer disputes—such as arguments over relay policy or spam-filter defaults—as hygiene issues, not existential ones. They matter for performance and propagation, but not for the core monetary assurances: “21 million or bust.”
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He invoked the lessons of the block-size war to explain why the system’s checks and balances are a feature, not a bug. “Ultimately, who is running consensus at Bitcoin?… The node clients are very valuable and they are in control versus miners and their self-interests. And that was a huge moment because it showed you decentralization was alive.” The line between hard-coded rules and socially enforced norms will always invite argument, he conceded, but in his view that process “future-proof[s] Bitcoin as the ultimate store of value.”
Throughout, Park returned to flows. Gold’s flows, in his assessment, are being pulled by geopolitics and central-bank behavior—especially in Asia. Bitcoin’s flows will be pulled by institutional adoption and, potentially, by policy innovation that converts dormant balance-sheet strength into active demand. That is why he sees the assets as complements within the same macro problem set rather than rivals fighting for a single inflow.
“Gold’s greatest cultural power is its impermanent fixture in our mindset and its durability for eons,” he said. Bitcoin, by contrast, offers sovereignty, portability, and programmability that younger cohorts find intuitive. “Young people are mentally more able to do things that older people can’t… the trend of young people understanding digital store of wealth… is the big picture.”
I spoke with @dgt10011 on whether we should be worried about bitcoin lagging gold’s performance, durability of bitcoin vs gold, how to think about bitcoin as living software, and a new theme referencing the retardification of society.
Enjoy!
YouTube: https://t.co/kwCRnibemU… pic.twitter.com/0BckI7h7Eb
— Anthony Pompliano 🌪 (@APompliano) October 3, 2025
If that generational shift meets a government-level balance-sheet pivot, Park believes the market structure can change quickly. “A trillion dollars of Bitcoin is hugely impactful,” he repeated, not because it solves everything overnight, but because it reorganizes incentives for issuers, custodians, and policymakers around a credibly scarce digital reserve. In that world, the present period—where gold leads and Bitcoin consolidates—may be remembered not as divergence, but as staging.
“Bitcoin will catch up,” Park said. “These are ultimately driven by flows.” And if those flows are seeded by the very gold rally now commanding headlines, the supercycle label he’s willing to use may not be hyperbole, but simply a description of how compounding works when new liquidity finally meets hard caps.
At press time, BTC traded at $120,313.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
