Why Has Bitcoin Price Shown Weakness?
Spot Bitcoin ETFs, the engine of the 2024-2025 rally, are partially to blame.
They recently went into reverse with roughly $4.4 billion in outflows over a record 13-day streak, flipping 2026 flows negative for the first time since launch. BlackRock's IBIT alone lost $3.3 billion.
These outflows haven't happened in a vacuum. A significant portion of crypto's recent weakness stems from external gravitational pulls and psychological shocks. Briefly, there was a major capital rotation from crypto to the increasingly crowded AI trade.
Read more: Strategy Bitcoin Sale, Investor AI Pivot Send BTC and Altcoin Prices Tumbling
Layer on hotter-than-expected inflation, soft GDP data, and the Iran conflict, and you get what one post-mortem described as a convergence of forces: macro fear drove ETF outflows, outflows drove price down, and falling price deepened the fear.
It doesn’t help that Bitcoin has historically been correlated with software-as-a-service (SaaS) stocks, which have been crushed thanks to the meteoric rise of coding agents.
The 4-Year Bitcoin Cycle and the 4chan Prophet
Here's the uncomfortable part for anyone declaring the cycle dead: So far, everything is on schedule.
In December 2023, an anonymous 4chan poster laid out a time-based model of roughly 1,064 days from bear market low to cycle top, followed by around 364 days of decline. That projected a top on Oct. 6, 2025. Bitcoin peaked that week.
A standard caveat applies: 4chan predictions suffer massive survivorship bias, and at least one viral "prophet returns" post has been debunked as fabricated. But this call is well documented and accepted as genuine.
If the symmetry holds, the bottom would land in Q4 2026, consistent with the prior two cycles, where both the 2018 and 2022 lows arrived roughly 12 months after the top.
Benjamin Cowen, the cycle's most prominent defender, didn’t blink in a recent X
post: "The biggest critics of the Four Year Cycle for Bitcoin will become the biggest cheerleaders of it in a few months."
Read more: The CLARITY Act Is Close: What Happens if Crypto’s Biggest US Bill Passes?
When Will Bitcoin Price Bottom, and How Will We Know?
A recovery beginning around Q4 2026 would be the strongest validation of cycle theory yet. Until then, there are a few tells to keep an eye on:
Price levels: The 200-week moving average (around $62,000) has acted as bear market support since 2015. It was tagged in June for the first time this cycle. Below it sit a couple of on-chain floors: realized price near $54,000 and CVDD near $46,000, the zone Glassnode's co-founder calls the highest-probability bottom.
Capitulation signals: Supply held at a loss has crossed above supply held in profit, a condition that marked the lows of 2015, 2019, 2020, and 2022. CryptoQuant
notes supply-in-loss above 50% has historically signaled "[Bitcoin-native] capitulation and formation of cycle bottom." Moreover, an
MVRV-Z reading below 0 and a floor under the declining hash rate would be strong bottom signals.
Apathy: This happens when volume dries up, price drifts sideways, and "Bitcoin is dead" obituaries pile up. Think mid-2015 or early 2019. We aren't there yet. The market is likely in the angry stage currently, which (by the cycle playbook) means the bottom is closer but still ahead. In other words, when articles like this one stop getting clicks, that's historically been a strong signal.
And the catalysts—a strategic Bitcoin reserve, the
CLARITY Act, the friendliest regulatory backdrop in Bitcoin's history, and expected Fed rate cuts—haven't gone anywhere.
As Schwab's Ferraioli
put it: "If you wait till [the] CLARITY Act or some other catalyst, you may be too late."
Cycle theory says the worst isn't over. It also says the cycle itself isn’t, either.
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