River did the math on what happens if Wall Street's own Bitcoin advice actually gets followed. The number: $840,000 per BTC by 2031. Here's exactly how they got there. Start with where things actually stand today. Only about 4% of people hold Bitcoin. US investment advisors, who collectively manage $146 trillion, have allocated just 0.008% of that to BTC. But something changed in January 2024. Since the Bitcoin spot ETFs launched, institutional adoption has been quietly building. 29 of the 30 largest registered investment advisors in the US now report Bitcoin ETF holdings. The median allocation is still tiny, just 0.1% of assets, but it's climbing every year. Here's the gap that matters: that 0.1% is far below what major institutions are actually recommending. BlackRock suggests 1-2%. Spanish bank BBVA recommends up to 7%. River's core thesis: if a modest allocation, bigger than today's 0.1% but still small, becomes standard practice, the resulting capital flow could move the price dramatically. The math: If 20-40% of portfolios adopt a 2-4% Bitcoin allocation, that's $1.3 to $5.3 trillion in new buying demand. That's measured against $333 trillion in global investable assets, of which US advisors control roughly 40%. River models this playing out over 3-5 years. For context, that's 1.7x to 7.1x more capital than flowed into Bitcoin during the entire 2022-2025 period. So what does that inflow actually do to price? Stock market research shows $1 of buying demand typically expands market cap by about $5. Bitcoin's historical multiplier has ranged between 3.1 and 4.5. River deliberately uses a conservative 3x multiplier for this model. Run the math: $1.3-5.3T in demand × 3x multiplier = $3.9-15.9T added to Bitcoin's market cap. Current market cap sits around $1.6T. End result: a price range of $250,000 to $840,000 within 5 years. And the lower bound, $250K, only requires current institutional adoption trends to continue. Nothing extra has to happen. Now, the skeptic's checklist, because this deserves scrutiny. River explicitly calls this conservative. A Bitwise survey found 56% of advisors not yet in crypto are planning or considering an allocation, meaning the 20-40% portfolio penetration assumption could end up too low, not too high. Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan holds a similar view, arguing the next bull market gets driven by advisors and institutional capital, not corporate treasury buyers like Strategy. His own long-term target: $1 million within 10 years. Even River's 3x multiplier looks conservative next to alternatives. Analyst Will Clemente used a 10x multiplier in a separate calculation and found that a 1% pension fund allocation alone ($700B out of $70T in total assets) could add $7 trillion to Bitcoin's market cap. The honest caveat nobody should skip: this only models demand. It says nothing about supply-side selling pressure. In 2025, long-term holders offloaded hundreds of thousands of BTC into strength. Price is always the interaction of both sides, not just institutional buying. But that cuts both ways. If sellers ever stopped showing up below a certain price while price-insensitive demand kept flowing in, that price gets defended instantly, not gradually. Bottom line: this isn't a moonshot fantasy. It's what happens if BlackRock's own 1-2% recommendation, already public, already stated, just becomes normal practice. That alone would be enough to change everything.