Bitcoin Could Reach $1 Million if Banks Allocate 1%, Says Creator of Latin America's First Bitcoin ETF

Brazilian entrepreneur and researcher João Paulo Mayall, co-founder of QR Capital and responsible for launching QBTC11, the first Bitcoin ETF in Latin America, published his own model this week to answer one of the market's most speculated questions: what happens to the price of Bitcoin if banks are allowed to buy it.

Named MBFM (Mayall Bank Flow Multiplier), the model is based on three numbers. Global banks hold about $190 trillion in assets, according to the Financial Stability Board. The entire Bitcoin market is currently valued at approximately $1.27 trillion. And, according to Mayall, the lock between one number and the other is being sequentially unlocked.

"The largest flow in Bitcoin's history depends on 3 sequential unlocks, and 2 are already underway," the analyst wrote on X.

The first is the CLARITY Act, which has already passed the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate Banking Committee, with only the full chamber vote remaining. The law classifies Bitcoin as a digital commodity and provides the legal certainty that American banks require to operate the asset.

The second is Basel. The Committee's standard, effective from January 2026, assigns a risk weight of 1,250% to Bitcoin, which requires banks to set aside one dollar of capital for every dollar of exposure. "This is basically a prohibition in practice," summarizes Mayall. However, the Basel Committee has already initiated a targeted review of the standard, with an update expected later this year.

Once the two ends are unlocked, the third element comes in, which, according to the analyst, the market ignores: flow does not move price in a one-to-one ratio.

Financial literature estimates that every dollar of liquidity that enters Bitcoin increases the market cap by multiples, with estimates ranging from 2x to 25x in studies by Chris Burniske, reaching 118x in a 2021 report from Bank of America, since the supply is fixed and most coins never reach the market.

The MBFM deliberately uses the conservative floor of this literature, with multipliers of 2x, 5x, and 10x. The results: with an allocation of 0.5% of global banking assets, Bitcoin would rise from $158,000 to $537,000. With 1%, the intermediate scenario points to $537,000 and the upper scenario breaks $1 million. With 2%, the model approaches $2 million per unit.

Mayall acknowledges the limits of the exercise. Even with the risk weight normalized, the Basel Committee is discussing a cap on direct exposure to crypto assets in the range of 1% to 2% of banks' Tier 1 capital, and the model assumes static supply, without reflexivity or derivative effects. The thesis, however, is that the banking channel unlocks flow far beyond proprietary positions, including custody, treasury, collateral, and products for clients.

The model is part of the research work that Mayall conducts at Mayall Private Research, a restricted circle of educational and analytical content on the Bitcoin thesis and its developments, from Strategy's preferred shares to miners and listed exchanges, covering the macro agenda and regulatory fronts that define institutional flow, from the CLARITY Act and Basel to the regulation of VASPs by the Central Bank and the crypto legal framework in Brazil.

Author of four published studies on SSRN, covering the validation of Bitcoin by Austrian monetary theory, the effects of monetary expansion on inflation, the paradox of central banks' gold reserves, and a new statistical filter for monetary aggregates, Mayall summarizes the thesis in the phrase that closed the post: "The largest buyer in history has not yet been given permission to buy."

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