I’ve lived through enough crypto cycles to know every big drawdown gets a convenient story. After the autumn 2025 sell-off, it was: “Relax, it’s healthy.” When Volodymyr Nosov, founder and president of WhiteBIT Group, said the same thing in his January 2026 Benzinga interview, I heard someone speaking from inside the rails I actually use, not a distant PR script.
This is my view from the desk: where his roadmap overlaps with my numbers and how that shapes my positioning into 2026.
“In 2026, we will see even greater regulatory clarity.”
My filter on those comments starts with regulation and how I already size around it. Most major jurisdictions are locking in rules for digital assets and stablecoins. Over the last two years, I’ve shifted my regulated exposure from roughly 5–10% to about 40% of my crypto. Today that means around one-third of BTC and ETH in spot ETFs and supervised custodians, plus a short list of compliant exchanges.
That leaves the book near 65/35. Roughly 65% sits in low-velocity, mostly regulated exposure, I’m prepared to hold through macro noise. The remaining 35% is a higher-beta sleeve I rotate through narratives, perp,s and alts.
“Such corrections are a healthy mechanism.”
His “healthy mechanism” line on the autumn correction matches what I saw on the blotter. I turned that move into cutting a BTC swing long at about -6.3%, then flipping short for roughly +3.8%. After that, I re-entered lower and pulled another +4.6% on the bounce.
I ran the same structure on ETH and overheated L1s. In the end, roughly 40% of my yearly PnL came from trading inside a single cleanup — in a market where 20–30% drawdowns are baked into the design, not proof the system is dying.
“The market today is far more resilient than it was several years ago.”
What really separates this cycle from older ones is what doesn’t break underneath those moves. Fiat rails stayed open. Major venues stayed online. Withdrawals worked.
So the stress sat in positions instead of in the plumbing. My response was mechanical. I cut net long exposure from around 130% to 80%. I dropped alts from roughly 40–45% of the book to under 20%. I rotated that risk into BTC, ETH and a small basket of infrastructure names. I kept leverage in the 1–3x range and treated 20–30% drawdowns in quality assets as rebalancing events, not existential threats.
“The RWA market will continue its rapid development.”
The roadmap lines up again on tokenization. Nosov puts the tokenized asset market in the $10–15 trillion range over the next five years. I express that view through a tight RWA sleeve: around 5% of NAV in tokenized treasuries, one on-chain credit pool, and a small FreeBnk (FRBK) position I built around its listing on WhiteBIT.
I scaled in during the first days of trading and took roughly +32% on the active part of the move. After that, I left a smaller bag as a longer-horizon RWA bet. I also used the “FreeBnk Party” promo mainly to watch how real users behaved around a fresh listing.
“Our team will take part in the tokenization of their stock market.”
The Saudi agreement takes that theme from thesis to plumbing. Tokenizing a roughly $2.7 trillion stock market, wiring WBT and Whitechain into that flow, and building CBDC rails for a currency with around $1 trillion in broad money, backed by national data centres and mining, is the kind of infrastructure play that justifies keeping a core WBT slice of around 7–8% of my long-term book.
At today’s ~$12.2 billion market cap, according to CoinDesk, that position is sized as a high-conviction but not unchecked bet. I still price in tail risks like banking cut-offs or permanent regulatory exile, but as lower-probability, longer-dated outcomes for a platform that now has a state as partner.
“One of the key factors is security.”
All of this sits on top of a security model that stays more conservative than the narratives. I cap any single exchange at around 20–25% of my liquid book and keep 70–80% of my net worth in cold storage.
On WhiteBIT, that means hardware keys, withdrawal whitelists and tight API permissions. It also means a hard split between “vault” accounts and “execution” accounts that only hold a week or two of trading float. New, complex protocols that haven’t survived a real scare sit at a 1–2% position cap until they prove they can take a hit.
“We see strong demand and significant potential.”
The last overlap is in everyday usage. WhiteBIT Nova card numbers are some of the clearest adoption data in Nosov’s comments: average monthly spend of around €750, mostly groceries, cafés and subscriptions across Italy, Spain, Ireland, Poland and the Netherlands. Only a minority of users even ask for a physical card.
That pattern rhymes with my own behaviour. I use crypto cards as rails for travel and recurring bills, so roughly 20–30% of my monthly fiat spend now runs through channels that plug straight into my trading stack. That cuts FX and banking fees and lets me keep an extra 10–15% of working capital in crypto instead of constantly off-ramping.
Wrapping up the takes
Wrap that into W Group — exchange, processor, chain, marketplace, fintech and media — and you get what matters to me: surface area that keeps balances from leaking out when volatility hits.
Going into 2026, I’m betting on a more regulated, institution-heavy cycle where corrections clean the system, so I want risk in compliant infrastructure, tokenization rails and real payment flows.
As long as that story matches how I actually run my book — lower leverage, real volume through crypto cards, infra and RWA sized for years — I’m fine with one plan: stay exposed to the trend, not parked in cash.
How Nosov’s 2026 Outlook Ended Up Matching 40% of My 2025 P&L was originally published in Coinmonks on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.