The specter of the supercycle appears every time a bull market is reaching its top. “This time is different” is heard at conferences, read in forums. “Never before has such a person or such a company supported Bitcoin, bought so much BTC.” And people even begin to doubt. Could it be that this time it is different?
Of course it’s different. It’s always different. Bitcoin is an asset in the process of monetization, in the process of price discovery. There will always be new players coming to the market, there will always be a new cohort of holders, simply because the understanding of Bitcoin is increasingly penetrating more minds in all strata of society.
Every cycle we have had significant new players entering Bitcoin. In 2011 it was WikiLeaks, which was so important that It scared even Satoshi himself. In 2014 Microsoft accepted payments with BTC. In 2017 the Chicago Mercantile Exchange launched bitcoin futures. In 2021 they were teslaMicroStrategy and El Salvador. In this cycle it was BlackRock and the rest of the ETFs, donald trump and the Bitcoin Treasurers.
This time, like all the others, was different. In this cycle, Bitcoin entered the American economy.
Bitcoin has always grown in four-year cycles, marked by halvings. Even though new actors with increasingly deeper pockets enter, it seems as if these cycles were natural to the essence of Bitcoin.
Furthermore, even though Bitcoin seeks to be a opt-out To the fiat economy, it is still just a drop in an ocean determined by the intervention and manipulation of the global market by central banks. This means that Bitcoin investors continue to be affected by the market cycles produced by the macroeconomic decisions of the fiat economy elite.
But this time it was different in another essential way. Bitcoin was the only narrative of this cycle.
Yes, stablecoins, (or, more precisely, USDT and a little bit USDC) gained enormous relevance in public discourse. But if we look at the dominance of the cryptocurrency market, unlike past cycles, Bitcoin maintained firm growth since the last cycle, while Ethereum, stablecoins and the rest of the altcoins lost share.
There was no altseason, or if there was it was very brief, practically imperceptible. Ethereum barely surpassed its previous ATH. Altcoins as a whole, measured by market cap, despite millions of coins being created since last cycle, barely surpassed their previous ATH. Yes, some individual altcoins like Zcash skyrocketed, but it was not a global phenomenon. Bitcoin, on the other hand, from a previous ATH of USD 69,000, It climbed to USD 126,000.
This means that The market has been maturing to value more the importance of having hard moneyinstead of betting on the passing fashion of the moment.
Another difference was that retailers did not have the impact on price that they had in past cycles. This speaks to the fact that more and more capital is needed to move the price of bitcoin, but also to the institutionalization of the asset.
So much so that, while in other cycles the new regulations brought down the price, in this one the regulation helped it and still favors it. It was largely the 180-degree regulatory shift, supported by Donald Trump, that led to a growing number of companies in this country adopting bitcoin and, at the same time, Its price will correlate more with the country’s economy.
While the price appears to be heading back into a bear market, there has never been such a steep drop amid so much news and so much positive movement for bitcoin, so much adoption news and so much recognition of value.
Today Bitcoin may be more linked to US economic movements, but, in future cycles, we will see how it is linked to more and more countries.
We don’t know where the price will go in the short term. From a technical perspective, there is a potential rebound point for Bitcoin at $75,000. But the chances of this happening are slim. In past cycles, the price of Bitcoin has fallen to levels of the cost of producing BTC for miners. In the current context, this opens the possibility of a fall to around USD 60,000 as the bottom of this bear market.
The chances of the Federal Reserve cutting interest rates have fallen sharply as inflation persists, amid solid jobs data and a strong dollar. This reduces liquidity for assets considered risky like BTC, exacerbated by US-China trade tensions as well as the government shutdown.
In general, the inflow of money has fallen. Bitcoin ETFs are mostly recording departures net, which reaffirms that this investor profile does not have a long-term ideological conviction, but rather actively manages its portfolio to maximize performance.
Bitcoin treasury creation, Michael Saylor’s foolproof strategy for reviving zombie companies, has also been in decline since September, after growing steadily in 2025.
The truth is that Strategy’s fall below mNAV 1.00 weakened confidence in bitcoin’s growth in the short term. Michael Saylor was the main voice encouraging multiple investors of the latest generation to enter the market. Although the company has already recovered a mNAV of 1.19the fall it suffered represented a significant symbolic blow to the market. All this denotes the impact that the US economy is having on the price of bitcoin.
As usual, Bitcoin fundamentals remain intact. The reasons why Bitcoin is perceived as a valuable asset have not changed, so these momentary dips represent more of a buying opportunity than something to worry about. Let’s say Bitcoin is 30% off this Black Friday.
If USD 75,000 is lost, we can say with complete certainty that we have entered a bear market, and we would confirm that price cycles based on halvings remain as valid as ever. Until the next bullish cycle comes and new actors join Bitcoin and we once again say “this time it is different.”
Bitcoin is becoming the baseline asset by which the global market is measured. From now on, world events will increasingly be reflected in the price as its adoption spreads throughout the globe. This will be more evident than in any other asset because it does not have the public, open and neutral nature of Bitcoin. Today the narrative is that of a reserve of value; We will soon see how Bitcoin becomes the world’s unit of account.