- Bitcoin’s volatility is now lower than Nvidia’s.
- Institutional participation is reshaping Bitcoin’s long-term behavior.
- The classic four-year cycle appears to be losing influence.
Bitcoin (BTC)’s reputation as the wild child of the cryptocurrency market may be fading fast.
In a CNBC segment shared by Wu Blockchain in an X post on January 8, Bitwise chief investment officer (CIO) Matt Hougan said Bitcoin’s volatility over the past year has been lower than Nvidia’s, in a comparison that would’ve sounded absurd to most investors just a few years ago.
Hougan appeared alongside ReserveOne CIO Sebastian Bea, and both argued that institutional investors are quietly reshaping how Bitcoin trades, potentially weakening the famous four-year cycle that has guided crypto narratives for more than a decade.
Bitcoin’s Four-Year Cycle May Be “Dead”
Asked whether Bitcoin’s four-year cycle still matters, Hougan said it’s becoming “less important” and increasingly replaced by what he called a “10-year grind” driven by larger structural forces.
In his words, “the four-year cycle is being replaced by a 10-year grind,” pointing to the launch of spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January 2024, ongoing regulatory progress, and growth in stablecoins and tokenization as catalysts that now matter more than the old halving-led framework.
“There are big new forces in the world. They started coming in with the launch of the ETF in January of 2024. (…) I think those forces are bigger and stronger than the forces that historically caused the four-year cycle.”
He added that while the cycle may still influence behavior because “it’s in people’s minds,” he no longer thinks Bitcoin is truly moving within that same repeating pattern.
Bea didn’t fully bury the cycle, mainly because humans still drive markets and, as he put it, “humans are predictably irrational.” But he suggested that even if the cycle persists, its intensity may be changing, with less extreme upside and downside than prior eras.
Institutions Are Becoming A Built-In Stabilizer
The most important shift, both CIOs argued, is how institutions trade compared with retail.
Bea explained that institutions often operate within fixed portfolio rules. If Bitcoin fails below an allocation threshold, they buy to rebalance. If it rises too far, they sell to reset. That behavior can dampen volatility over time because it functions almost like an automatic stabilizer.
“If it’s down and it’s in the plan, they actually have to buy to reset to their strategic asset allocation. (…) If it goes out of bounds, whether it’s too high or too low, they either become sellers or buyers. That is a stabilizing force for Bitcoin.”
Hougan agreed, saying the market is increasingly shaped by two competing forces. These include fast-moving retail, which tends to chase momentum and rotate based on narratives like the four-year cycle, and slow-moving institutions, which accumulate on longer horizons and rebalance systematically.
That tug-of-war, Hougan suggested, helps explain why Bitcoin can drop hard, but not as violently as it used to.
“The reason we’re down 30% and not 60% is this persistent, slow-moving institutional buying that’s keeping the market up.”
He even described a potential new pattern: “a staircase up and then an elevator down.”
From Regulatory Gray Area To “Mature Asset Class”
Both emphasized how dramatically the conversation around Bitcoin has changed in five years. Bea said Bitcoin used to sit in a legal gray zone, with uncertainty around whether it was a commodity or a security, and limited regulated access.
“Five years ago, Bitcoin was in a really gray area. We didn’t know if it was a commodity or a security.”
Today, he pointed to compliant custody and SEC-regulated ETFs as proof that the asset has matured for institutions.
“We now have qualified custodians. We have ETFs that are regulated by the SEC. (…) It’s a different asset than it was.”
Hougan echoed that shift, noting that institutional questions have moved from “how does Bitcoin work?” to practical portfolio questions like where it fits, expected long-term correlations, and how it behaves across market regimes.
“Five years ago, the questions were: ‘How does Bitcoin work? What it mining? How do you do custody? (…) Now the questions are: Where does it fit in a portfolio? What are the long-term return characteristics?”
In other words, the pitch has evolved from explaining Bitcoin to implementing Bitcoin.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin’s average daily trading volume of about $37.8 billion in the first week of 2026 outpaced Nvidia’s average $26.8 billion, which means it has outperformed one of the most actively traded and closely watched tech stocks by roughly 41%.
Bitcoin price today
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