The Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) price trades near $64,800 today, roughly 49% below the record it set last October. Bitcoin briefly dropped below $60K in late June, closing at a low of $58,566 on June 30, which is its lowest in almost two years.
With Bitcoin swinging between $58,000 and $65,000 over the past six weeks, many are asking if this is the bottom or if there’s another leg lower.
Standard Chartered and ARK Say Bitcoin Already Hit Its Low
Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, said on June 12 that Bitcoin had already bottomed at $59,000, which is 53% below the October record. He wrote that “winter is over” and it was time to “welcome back to crypto Spring.”
Bitcoin had fallen to around $59,000 in the days before he wrote, so Kendrick was pointing at a low the market had just made rather than a level he had calculated. He had been far more bearish in February, warning of capitulation and cutting his near-term Bitcoin target to $50,000.
What changed his mind was SpaceX’s $75 billion Nasdaq debut on the same day. Kendrick argued that most of the $5.72 billion pulled out of spot Bitcoin ETFs since mid-May was investors freeing up cash for that listing rather than giving up on crypto, so the selling should stop once the IPO was done. However, Bitcoin kept falling after he published, closing June down 20.48% and finishing June 30 at $58,566, just below the floor he said would hold.
Kendrick also named three things that would confirm the call, which were ETF inflows returning, corporate treasuries buying again, and oil prices falling. All three happened in June. Spot Bitcoin ETFs have not had a single day of net outflows in August, and oil dropped toward $80 a barrel after the US-Iran peace deal. The corporate buying has since reversed, though, with Strategy selling 1,638 Bitcoin in late July.
Kendrick is not alone in thinking the low is in. ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood says Bitcoin “seems to be in a bottoming process” and will “resume the very volatile but broad uptrend,” and her evidence is the Bitcoin-to-gold ratio, which measures how much gold one Bitcoin buys. That ratio steadied even while gold weakened, which tells her Bitcoin has stopped losing ground against the asset investors run to when they get nervous.
Galaxy Research Sees Bitcoin’s Low Between $40,000 and $46,000
Alex Thorn, Galaxy Research’s head of firmwide research, published a cycle study the same day Kendrick called the bottom and reached the opposite conclusion. Galaxy went back through every Bitcoin cycle top and bottom on record and found that only four of the 13 signals that marked previous bottoms had shown up this time.
