Delphi Digital: Nearly every 5-year BTC, ETH, and SOL entry point since 2016 delivered positive returns.

Delphi Digital's backtest of daily price data since May 2016 finds that across all possible 5-year holding windows, Bitcoin recorded just 11 negative return periods — the worst of which was roughly -13%. Ethereum and Solana, when staking yields are included, recorded zero negative 5-year windows.

The median 5-year return for Bitcoin exceeded 8x; Ethereum&#x27;s came in at nearly 13x. To put that in perspective, Nvidia&#x27;s widely celebrated ~14x gain over the past five years sits around the third quartile of historical <a class="ticker-mention" href="/en-US/token/btc">BTC</a> and <a class="ticker-mention" href="/en-US/token/eth">ETH</a> 5-year distributions — meaning the majority of crypto holders who simply held for five years outperformed one of the best-performing large-cap equities of the decade.

The data makes a straightforward case for time-in-market over timing the market across the majors — a point that becomes harder to dismiss as the dataset grows longer.