The market would have already discounted many regulatory issues already resolved. For Hougan, institutional adoption supports a sustained rise in the price of bitcoin. Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at capital management company Bitwise, says that although he remains optimistic about bitcoin (BTC) by 2026, explosive rises could be behind us. According to the executive, increasing market maturity and institutional adoption of the asset will reduce bitcoin volatilitymarking a change in the dynamics of its price movements. In this regard, he said: “I believe that the four-year cycle is being replaced by a ’10-year constant advance’. By this I mean that there are massive new forces in the world.” In that sense, he explained: “[estas fuerzas] They began to arrive with the launch of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) in January 2024. They accelerated with regulatory progress in January of this year. We have the growth of stablecoins and tokenization. I believe that these forces are larger and stronger than those that historically caused the four-year cycle.” As BitcoinDynamic has reported, halving and four-year cycles are historic BTC catalysts.
The price of bitcoin rose after each halving. Source: TradingView. However, Hougan suggests that bitcoin is entering a more mature consolidation stage, in which these drivers lose prominence. against more solid structural factorssuch as institutional adoption, advanced regulation and the expansion of financial ecosystems based on digital assets. This could translate into more sustained and less volatile growth, changing the way investors perceive and They are related to the currency created by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Volatility decreases
Hougan further elaborated on this point by stating that BTC volatility has decreased: «We are seeing lower volatility; BTC is now less volatile than Nvidia over the last year, which is a notable development. I think this distribution from retailers to institutions is happening: Harvard is buying and the retailer is selling.» The following graph shows the evolution of the price of BTC and the Nvidia stock price (blue line) in the last 12 months:
Price of Nvidia and bitcoin in the last 12 months. Source: TradingView. From Bitwise’s perspective, he added that institutional adoption It’s just starting to pick up pace.. «I don’t think the cryptocurrency world is used to how slowly these institutions move. As two examples: we just had the ‘big four’ banks (Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, Wells Fargo and UBS) approving BTC products, even though ETFs were launched quite a while ago. We are just opening the doors,» he said in an interview with the CNBC television network. Finally, Hougan highlighted the impact of the regulatory environment on the perception of BTC:
I think there was a unique effect of the Trump administration on BTC. The effect was simple: if you asked institutional investors in previous years why they didn’t invest in BTC, the main reason was not volatility or valuation, but regulatory concerns.
He also assured that with the new administration and the new regulatory environment, the outlook became clearer, making BTC a safe asset for institutions to invest in. “Now the regulatory area is clear, and the biggest effect will be cascading on other digital assets.”
