Solstice CEO: Crypto’s boom-and-bust cycles are losing steam

Solana-based DeFi executive Ben Nadareski says the crypto market’s era of extreme boom-and-bust cycles may be fading as liquidity deepens across trading venues—even in downturns. Speaking on Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction, the CEO of Solstice argued that broader participation and more robust market infrastructure reduce the conditions that historically amplified sharp price moves.

Nadareski also framed crypto increasingly as a destination for institutional capital and mainstream wealth, rather than purely speculative trading. While he cautioned against reliving past turbulence, he pointed to data suggesting volatility is already declining in major markets like Bitcoin as volumes and market depth rise.

Key takeaways

• Nadareski links lower volatility to deeper liquidity across major trading pairs, noting it has improved even during bear markets.
• Glassnode and Fasanara Digital report that Bitcoin’s one-year realized volatility dropped sharply over 2025, attributing part of the move to growing market depth and institutional participation.
• Bitcoin spot volumes expanded to a higher daily range compared with the prior cycle, consistent with a more liquid market structure.
• Nadareski expects stablecoins on Solana to grow from roughly $16 billion in current market capitalization to potentially near $100 billion within five years.
• Stablecoins are increasingly central to trading, with CEX.IO data cited as showing they made up 75% of total trading volume in Q1 2026.

Why deeper liquidity could dampen the old cycle

Nadareski’s core argument is structural: when liquidity is thicker, markets tend to absorb buying and selling pressure with less violent repricing. On Cointelegraph’s Chain Reaction, he said liquidity across major crypto trading pairs has increased significantly, including during bear markets, which he argued lessens the likelihood of the sharp swings that characterized earlier cycles.

His comments emphasize an investor-relevant shift. When volatility is driven by thin order books and crowded positioning, price moves can accelerate as liquidations and forced selling cascade. In contrast, deeper markets can reduce the severity of those feedback loops by improving execution and limiting sudden liquidity gaps.

“We don’t want to go through 2017. We don’t want to go through 2021. We don’t want to go through these massive fluctuations,” Nadareski said, framing the goal as a market that is still volatile at times, but less prone to extreme destabilizing moves.

Bitcoin data aligns with a lower-volatility narrative

Nadareski’s thesis is reinforced by market data cited from blockchain analytics firm Glassnode and asset manager Fasanara Digital. In a December 2025 report, the firms found Bitcoin’s one-year realized volatility fell from 84.4% to 43%. They attributed part of this decline to “growing market depth and institutional participation.”

The report also highlighted activity that typically accompanies deeper liquidity. It said daily Bitcoin spot volumes increased to between $8 billion and $22 billion per day from $4 billion to $13 billion during the previous market cycle, according to Glassnode’s research summary.

Separately, earlier coverage from Cointelegraph noted SkyBridge Capital managing partner Anthony Scaramucci arguing in March that Bitcoin’s four-year cycle has been “muted” by institutional investors and spot Bitcoin ETF inflows—though he suggested the traditional cycle dynamics had not fully disappeared. Taken together, the picture is not that volatility is gone, but that its drivers appear to be changing as participation and trading mechanics evolve.

Stablecoin growth on Solana: potential path to $100B

Nadareski also turned to stablecoins, predicting rapid expansion of Solana’s stablecoin market. He said the value of stablecoins on Solana could rise above $50 billion and approach $100 billion over the next five years, citing what he described as increasing adoption among fintech companies as well as Solana’s transaction speed and low fees.

To anchor the forecast, the article cited DefiLlama data placing Solana’s stablecoin market capitalization at about $16 billion. The gap between current levels and a possible $100 billion outcome reflects both a broader stablecoin adoption thesis and a network-specific bet on Solana’s ability to attract payments and on-chain settlement use cases.

For traders and liquidity providers, the practical implication is that stablecoins are increasingly the “working capital” of crypto markets. Stablecoin supply and trading behavior can influence how quickly capital rotates between spot and derivatives, and how readily liquidity is available during market stress.

Stablecoins as market fuel, not just a side component

The importance of stablecoins extends beyond one chain. The article cited CEX.IO data indicating stablecoins accounted for 75% of total crypto trading volume in the first quarter of 2026—described as the highest share on record—while transaction volume surpassed $28 trillion.

This matters because a higher stablecoin share often implies that more trading volume is funded in liquid, dollar-pegged instruments. In theory, that can support smoother execution and help markets maintain liquidity across different price regimes. At the same time, stablecoin growth can also concentrate certain risks—such as reliance on issuance and reserve structures—though the underlying mechanics were not elaborated in the source material.

Within the broader market structure, the combination of deeper liquidity, institutional participation, and stablecoin-enabled trading suggests that today’s crypto market may be operating closer to the behavior of traditional capital markets than it did during the most chaotic periods of earlier retail-driven cycles.

What to watch next is whether declining realized volatility and expanding spot volume persist as market participants test new liquidity conditions across bull and bear phases. On the stablecoin front, readers should track whether growth on Solana stays consistent with Nadareski’s multi-year projections and whether stablecoin dominance in trading continues to widen rather than normalize.