Bitcoin breaks one-year downtrend, analyst says bullish momentum returns

Bitcoin appears to have snapped a year-long losing streak in its price structure, at least according to one closely followed analyst. Gert van Lagen declared on September 21 that BTC has printed its first higher high since topping out near $126K, a development he calls a definitive break of the downtrend that has weighed on the asset since late 2025.

Bitcoin was trading around $85,900 at the time of his assessment, which means it's still roughly 30% below the all-time high it set approximately a year ago. But for technical traders, the direction of the trend matters more than the distance from the peak. And the direction, van Lagen argues, has finally flipped.

In technical analysis, a "higher high" is exactly what it sounds like: a price peak that exceeds the previous one. It's the minimum requirement for an uptrend. Without it, every rally is just a bounce inside a downtrend, the kind of move that lures in buyers before prices resume their slide.

Bitcoin's failure to produce a higher high for an entire year meant that every rally since the $126K peak was, structurally speaking, just a lower high inside a bearish trend. Van Lagen's claim is that this pattern has now broken, which shifts the technical backdrop from bearish to potentially bullish.