Bitwise CEO says four-year crypto cycle is dead as institutional era takes hold

Hunter Horsley, Bitwise Asset Management co-founder and CEO, has a message for crypto investors still waiting for the market to bounce back on schedule: stop waiting.

“The four-year cycle is dead,” Horsley said at Consensus 2026 in Miami, where he sat for an interview at Solana Accelerate with The Block’s Gareth Jenkinson. “The four-year cycle stipulates that you have three years of up markets and then a year of down markets. Last year was down, so it’s over,” he said, echoing rhetoric shared by Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan.

A new chapter

Building on the end of crypto’s four-year cycle, the Bitwise exec further pointed to a new industry regime for the growing digital asset sector.

Horsley reached for a Winston Churchill line — one his Bitwise colleagues Teddy Vasara regularly references — to capture this inflection: “This is not the end, it’s not the beginning of the end, but it is the end of the beginning.”

The patterns and intuitions of the prior era, he said, no longer apply in the new one.

Horsley suggested Morgan Stanley now features more prominently in crypto conversations than firms like Gemini, and that stablecoins, with an aggregate supply of over $300 billion, are attracting as much attention as altcoins.

The new chapter, in Horsley’s reading, will be defined by mainstream institutions, fewer dominant players, and broader adoption — a different kind of market altogether than in the past.

Stretch and the Saylor factor

On Strategy’s Stretch preferred instrument — one of the firm’s series of structured offerings built around a stable net asset value, bitcoin collateral, and yields above 10% — Horsley was unambiguous.

“I think this thing is a juggernaut,” he said. “I think it’s early innings.”

He drew a comparison to Snapchat’s disappearing photos: surprising on the surface, initially met with skepticism, but ultimately delivering something users wanted at the level of first principles.

According to Horsley, Stretch taps the same dynamic. A stable NAV backed by bitcoin as collateral, offering a yield that income investors can underwrite. The bitcoin-as-collateral insight, he said, “was hidden in plain sight.”

Horsley also predicted the structure would proliferate across the industry within the next 12 months, expanding bitcoin’s role into fixed-income markets in a way that would not have happened without Michael Saylor’s engineering.

The bullish read lands at a charged moment for Strategy.

STRC posted a record trading day last month and has emerged as a primary capital generation engine for Saylor’s ongoing bitcoin acquisition roadmap.

At the same time, Saylor has since acknowledged the firm may need to sell a portion of its BTC treasury to fund STRC dividends, a potential reversal of its longstanding pledge never to liquidate its bitcoin holdings.

The payments narrative

Speaking on crypto’s largest asset, Horsley pushed back on the notion that bitcoin’s (BTC) original payment vision has been permanently displaced by its identity as a store of value.

In his view, the last decade was necessarily focused on establishing that bitcoin has value at all, arguing that debate is now largely settled.

With hundreds of millions of people holding BTC and consensus forming broadly around its worth, the preconditions for a payments revival are finally in place, he argued.

“We’re actually going to step into that chapter sooner rather than later,” he said.

The BlackRock question

Bitwise now manages $15 billion in assets across more than 30 products, with nearly all of that growth concentrated between 2021 and now, up from under $1 billion at the start of that run.

BlackRock’s entry into the space, long anticipated as a competitive threat, has instead functioned as a rising tide for the whole industry, Horsley argued.

He said that BlackRock’s brand did the hardest part of the sales process for everyone in the space, including Bitwise.

“BlackRock is like the best thing that ever happened to Bitwise,” he said. “The biggest obstacle to Bitwise’s growth is not BlackRock. It’s people not prioritizing doing something in crypto or people feeling that they’re gonna get in trouble for doing something crypto.”

Horsley cast the competition as a specialist-versus-generalist matchup: Bitwise’s 200-person crypto-only firm against a diversified asset manager whose credibility now validates the asset class for institutional allocators who might otherwise have stayed out entirely.

The Block’s full interview with Hunter Horsley will be published later today.