Is Bitcoin getting less volatile? 15 years of data, and how BTC now compares with Tesla, Nvidia and gold

The question

Volatility – how much a price swings – shapes almost every decision about Bitcoin. It decides how large a position a fund can hold, how much a lender will lend against BTC, and whether a company can keep it on its balance sheet. For years the answer was simple: Bitcoin was several times more volatile than almost anything else people invested in.

We wanted to know whether that is still true. We used Bitstamp's daily Bitcoin prices back to 2011 and Yahoo Finance daily data for the S&P 500, the Nasdaq-100, gold futures, EUR/USD and large US stocks. Volatility here is the annualised standard deviation of daily returns – the standard measure used across finance.

One technical point: Bitcoin trades every day, so its yearly volatility uses 365 days; stocks, gold and currencies use their roughly 252 trading days. Both give a figure for how much the price typically swings over a year, so they can be compared.

A decade-long decline

In 2013, the year Bitcoin first went above $1,000, its volatility was 150%. It was 93% in the 2017 bubble and 81% in 2020 and 2021. Since then it has fallen steadily: 65% in 2022, 44% in 2023, 53% in 2024, 42% in 2025 and 45% in 2026 so far. Bitcoin is now swinging less than half as much as in its early years.

The main reasons are well known: a much larger market (Bitcoin's market value grew from roughly $150 million at the start of 2013 to well over a trillion dollars), deeper liquidity on many more exchanges, regulated futures and options, and since January 2024 spot Bitcoin ETFs that bring in long-term investors.

The violent days are rare now

The decline is even clearer when you count extreme days. In 2013 Bitcoin moved more than 10% in a single day on 47 days – almost once a week. In 2017 and 2018 it happened about twice a month. In 2023 it happened once, in 2024 twice, in 2025 not at all, and twice in 2026 so far. Moves above 5% fell from 113 days in 2013 to 17 in 2025.

Bitcoin vs Tesla, Nvidia and gold

The chart compares rolling one-year volatility. For most of the 2010s Bitcoin's line was far above every stock. That changed in the 2020s:

• Tesla: Bitcoin first dipped below Tesla's volatility in September 2020, and since early 2023 it has been below Tesla in every week. In 2025 Tesla's volatility was 63% against Bitcoin's 42%.
• Nvidia: since 2023 Bitcoin has been less volatile than Nvidia in about 55% of weeks. In 2024, the year of Nvidia's AI boom, the two were almost identical (52% for Nvidia, 53% for BTC); in 2026 Nvidia has been calmer (37% against 45%).
• Meta: Bitcoin was less volatile than Meta in about a fifth of weeks since 2023. In 2022, when Meta fell 64%, Meta's volatility (67%) was above Bitcoin's (65%).
• Gold: gold remains far calmer, but 2026 has been an unusual year for it: gold futures' volatility rose to 29%, the highest since the 2008 financial crisis.

Still about three times the stock market

Lower volatility does not make Bitcoin a safe asset. In 2026 it has been about 3.5 times as volatile as the S&P 500 (45% against 13%) and more than twice as volatile as the Nasdaq-100 (21%). Currency pairs such as EUR/USD swing even less (6%).

And bear markets still happen. From its October 2025 high of about $124,700 Bitcoin fell roughly 53% to about $58,500 by June 2026 – a large fall by any standard. The difference from earlier cycles is that this decline unfolded over months with few double-digit single days, while the 2018 and 2022 crashes included many.

What this means

1. Bitcoin's volatility has fallen by more than two-thirds since 2013, and extreme single-day moves are now rare.
2. On a one-year view, Bitcoin now swings less than Tesla and about as much as Nvidia or Meta.
3. It remains several times more volatile than broad stock indices, gold or currencies, and large drawdowns are still possible.

For live Bitcoin volatility ranges over 4 hours, 24 hours and 7 days, see our Bitcoin market data.