For the first time in the 31 editions of its Long-Term Capital Market Assumptions, J.P. Morgan Asset Management has put a return range on Bitcoin. The 2027 edition, published on 19 October, gives Bitcoin a base case of 10% a year over the next ten years.
On paper, that places Bitcoin ahead of the major public asset classes in the bank's tables. The same document assumes 7.5% a year for U.S. large-cap equities and 5.5% for gold. A traditional 60/40 portfolio sits near 7%.
Yet 10% is modest by the standards of the Bitcoin industry. In August 2025, Bitwise published its own long-term assumptions with a base case of 28.3% a year through 2035, a path to roughly $1.3 million per coin. JPMorgan arrives at a number less than half as large, and the way it gets there is the more interesting part of the report.
Three models, one dominant idea
The bank does not build a single forecast. It combines three valuation frameworks and weights them by how much confidence it has in each driver.
The first, weighted 65%, compares Bitcoin's supply growth, which slows with each four-year halving cycle, to the expansion of the U.S. and global money supply. Its base case is 10.7% a year.
The second, weighted 30%, treats Bitcoin as a complement to gold in portfolios. In the base case, investors rotate part of their gold exposure into Bitcoin; in the bull case, central banks add it to their reserves. This framework also produces 10.7% a year.
The third, weighted only 5%, values Bitcoin on network adoption, meaning actual use of the Bitcoin blockchain. Its base case is negative: minus 3.2% a year. The explanation sits in the bank's assumption that Bitcoin captures little benefit from the growth of tokenised assets, which it expects to develop mostly on other blockchains. On that view, expected usage alone does not justify the current price.
Weighted together, the three frameworks give 10.0%. In plain terms, 95% of JPMorgan's estimate rests on Bitcoin as a monetary asset and a store of value, and 5% on Bitcoin as a network people use. The starting point matters too: the projections assume a spot price of $83,000 at the end of September.
A wide range and a large volatility drag
JPMorgan pairs its base case with a bear case of minus 11.2% a year and a bull case of plus 16.6% a year over ten years. Some early coverage quoted a range of minus 9.7% to plus 17%; those figures belong to the money-supply framework alone, not to the combined estimate.
The bank assumes annual volatility of 55%, against about 17% for gold and 18% for U.S. large caps. One detail in its tables shows what that costs. Bitcoin's arithmetic average annual return is set at 20.9%, but its compound return is 10%. The gap between the two is the price of large swings: a 50% fall needs a 100% gain to recover, so high volatility pulls the return an investor actually compounds well below the simple average.
In the model, out of the portfolio
The report's most telling line is not the 10%. Despite ranking Bitcoin ahead of stocks, bonds and gold on expected return, JPMorgan does not add it to its main covariance matrices, the correlation tables that drive its strategic allocation work. Bitcoin appears instead in a smaller, standalone matrix against a subset of assets, for illustration.
The authors are explicit about their reasons. They see Bitcoin as "a speculative asset and a hedge against monetary easing," and they do not make a case for it as a diversifier because its correlations with other asset classes are unstable. Elsewhere in the report, the bank calls the idea that currency debasement will cause a rush into crypto assets "wide of the mark." The report even notes that it considers a formal ten-year forecast premature, which is why it frames the numbers as a range of outcomes.
The bank leaves the door open. If correlations stabilise and volatility keeps falling, it writes, Bitcoin's portfolio role "may improve in the future," helped by clearer regulation and deeper markets.
Other institutions have already crossed that line. In October 2025, Morgan Stanley's Global Investment Committee set a maximum crypto allocation of 2% to 4% depending on a portfolio's risk profile, while its model portfolios still carry no explicit crypto weight. In June 2025, BBVA's private bank said it advises wealthy clients to hold between 3% and 7% in crypto assets, depending on their tolerance for risk.
Method or reluctance?
JPMorgan's history with Bitcoin makes the decision easy to read in two ways. Chief executive Jamie Dimon called Bitcoin a "fraud" in 2017 and, at Davos in January 2024, described it as a "hyped-up fraud" and a "pet rock." Readers who remember those remarks may wonder whether the allocation decision reflects more than risk modelling.
The report itself offers a coherent technical argument: an asset whose correlations shift sharply from one period to the next is hard to place in an optimiser that depends on stable relationships. It is also worth noting that the bank weighted the network adoption model at only 5% and assumed that tokenisation will happen elsewhere, a judgment that many Bitcoin holders would contest. Whether these choices are purely methodological or also reflect institutional caution cannot be settled from the document.
What can be said is that Bitcoin has entered the reference tables of one of the largest asset managers in the world, with a number, a range and a method attached. The next step, from the assumption tables into the model portfolios, will show whether the obstacle was the data or the institution.
This publication is market analysis, not a recommendation to buy or sell.