Wealth in retirement: A use case for Bitcoin in IRAs

Can Bitcoin improve a retirement portfolio without breaching risk tolerance? Cointelegraph Research’s new report, “Wealth in Retirement: A Use Case for Bitcoin in IRAs,” backtests Bitcoin allocations inside IRA structures and stress-tests those results across thousands of simulated market scenarios. The findings challenge a core assumption behind traditional retirement planning. 

Download the complete Research here.

Your Retirement Portfolio Has a Hidden Flaw

Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) are tax-advantaged savings vehicles in the US that were created to encourage long-term wealth accumulation. Traditional IRAs defer taxes until withdrawal, while Roth IRAs allow tax-free qualified withdrawals because their contributions are made with after-tax dollars. Both formats amplify compounding over decades, which gives IRA contributions a structural edge over taxable accounts.

The core principle of IRA portfolio design is to balance growth against risk over decades. Younger investors often favor more equities allocation for their growth potential, while older participants favor an increased allocation to fixed-income instruments to reduce portfolio volatility. It’s a reasonable framework, but it has a structural flaw. Stocks and bonds are more correlated than most investors realize, and during real crises, they tend to fall together.

This played out in 2008, in the COVID crash of 2020, and again during the US tariff shock, when equities dropped while bond yields rose simultaneously. Because bond prices move inversely to yields, the hedge that fixed income was supposed to provide simply disappeared.

As these correlations between traditional assets rise, the classic 60/40 equity-bond mix needs to be revisited. Over the past decade, Bitcoin outperformed all major asset classes while maintaining near-zero correlation to equities and bonds. As an asymmetric, finite-supply asset, Bitcoin may be able to enhance long-horizon portfolios when conventional hedges misfire.

What is Bitcoin’s impact in IRAs?

In the new report, Cointelegraph Research backtested two annually rebalanced portfolios from 2015 to 2025. Portfolio A held a 60/40 equity-bond split. Portfolio B shifted 5% of equities into Bitcoin to form a 57/38/5 mix.

Portfolio B delivered a 16.39% annual return versus 8.96% from Portfolio A. Its worst drawdown was -18.37% versus -15.95% for Portfolio A, a gap of 242 basis points across a decade that included two Bitcoin bear markets exceeding 60%. This showed that even a small Bitcoin sleeve amplified returns without destabilizing overall risk.

The figures above, only tell only a part of the story. 

To find out what allocation size Bitcoin’s volatility starts to hurt more than it helps, the report goes further. It models 0%, 1%, 5%, and 10% Bitcoin allocations across 2,000 market simulated scenarios to reach  a $1 million retirement goal within a 30-year horizon.

Download the report to find out the result of this simulation