Bitcoin briefly plunged below $100,000 on Tuesday, roughly one month after reaching a record high above $126,000 in early October. Despite the volatility, Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan believes the asset is going through its “IPO moment,” and if past patterns hold, the market should celebrate it by buying more, not sitting out in frustration.

He added that the current setup means that “the days of 1% Bitcoin allocations are over.”

“Bitcoin Chopping Sideways Is A Gift”

The sideways slog, even amid roaring ETF inflows and regulatory wins, is exactly what happens when an asset moves from an early-adopter bet into a mainstream, institutionally-owned blue chip. In his latest post, Hougan cited a recent essay from macro investor Jordi Visser, who says Bitcoin is in a “silent IPO” phase: not a formal listing, but the same structural regime shift Facebook, Google, and other giants went through when they went public.

Facebook IPO’d at $38/share in 2012, then went flat and even down for 15 months, and today it trades at more than $600. The sideways chop in that period did not reflect deteriorating fundamentals; instead, it reflected distribution. Early employees were harvesting life-changing wealth, and institutions were slowly absorbing that float, one basis point rotation at a time.

That is exactly where Bitcoin is today, according to Hougan. Early believers, the ones who bought BTC ($103,841.00) at $1, or $10, or $100, are sitting on “generational” wealth. And they finally have a deep enough, liquid enough institutional demand base to exit into, thanks to the spot ETFs, sovereign funds now allocating, corporate treasuries diversifying, and compliance-heavy rails replacing the wild west.

Five years ago, someone selling $1 billion in BTC was a market event. Today, it is just a block. Hougan stresses that this is not bearish. This is what maturity looks like. And unlike a traditional IPO, Bitcoin does not need to go build revenue streams or new feature lines the way Meta did.

Once the early cohort has finished distributing, the only real constraint between a $2.5 trillion Bitcoin and a $25 trillion Bitcoin is broad global acceptance. This is why the Bitwise exec says that the sideways chop is a gift and not a warning.

5% Is The New Minimum

Hougan also argued that the implications for allocation are massive. In January 2024, when spot ETFs launched, Bitcoin’s volatility immediately began falling. As a maturing, institutionally-owned, liquid macro asset, he added that Bitcoin is still likely to be the best-performing large asset of the next decade.

“The days of a 1% allocation to Bitcoin are over. Increasingly, investors need to be thinking of 5% as a starting point. Bitcoin is going through its IPO moment. If history is any guide, we should celebrate by buying more.”

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