The start of a bear market, or one last pump before an even larger retracement?
So much for Uptober.
The whirlwind month had initially gone according to plan, sending Bitcoin to a new all-time high at $126,000 before Trump’s October 10 post on Truth Social sent the market nosediving.
It was the worst October for the BTC/USD price since 2018, ending up 3.69% in the red.
Yesterday, it briefly dipped below $100,000, the first time since June.
In addition to hundreds of billions of dollars being removed from this market last month, we’ve witnessed another large sell-off.
Yesterday, we saw $90 billion erased, including over $2 billion in crypto liquidations over the past 24 hours.
So, why on Earth did Bitcoin fall even with the expected 25 basis-point cut at last week’s Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) meeting?
While the Polymarket odds still favour a 25 bps decrease in December, which would make it three consecutive rate cuts from the Fed, this has dropped sharply since the October 27–28 meeting, following Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s comments, particularly this one:
“A further reduction in the policy rate at the December meeting is not a foregone conclusion.”
Transcript of Chair Powell’s Press Conference, October 29, 2025.
Other hawkish feedback by Powell, including a persistently higher inflation rate than the ideal 2% target (despite a significant drop from mid-2022 levels), alongside bearish comments and cryptic X posts by renowned investor Michael Burry about major tech stocks, has started spooking markets.
Despite a reportedly low correlation with the Nasdaq, Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, as risk-on assets, remain vulnerable to macroeconomic factors such as interest rates and inflation.
Additionally, clients of major Bitcoin spot ETF providers, including BlackRock, Fidelity, and ARK 21Shares, have consistently been offloading hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin daily over the past five consecutive days, as indicated by CoinMarketCap’s Bitcoin ETF Net Flow Chart.
But wait, there’s more.
Two Bitcoin whales, BitcoinOG (a.k.a. 1011short) and Owen Gunden, have sent 13,000 and 3,265 BTC, respectively, to centralised and decentralised exchanges over the past few weeks.
Whether they’re looking to buy back into the market at lower prices and accumulate even more BTC, or cash out for good, remains to be seen. This will also encourage others to keep a close eye on what other Satoshi-era (pre-2011) BTC wallets do.
Exactly a year on from Trump’s re-election, many eyes have turned to the results for today’s New York City elections.
It appears that Zohran Mamdani has won the bid to be the Mayor of N.Y.C.… let’s see how this affects markets in the coming weeks. There’s never a dull moment in American politics, but I digress.
Additional thoughts
While Bitcoin and the majority of altcoins are experiencing double-digit percentage losses once again, privacy coins such as Zcash (ZEC) and Dash (DASH) have bucked the trend. ZEC and DASH have increased by over 1,000% and 440%, respectively, over the past three months.
A portion of this growth is organic, but I believe much of it is a rapid, temporary shift of capital from BTC and major altcoins into these, as well as a handful of low-cap projects, such as Humanity (H), MemeCore (M), and Decred (DCR).
I’ve noticed Hivemapper (HONEY), a Solana-based DePIN project that I have previously covered, is also starting to pump.
So, is $126,000 the “cycle top”?
I don’t think so.
Now that we have a much higher concentration of institutional investors in this asset class and more regulatory clarity, I doubt the four-year cycle still holds.
“The fact that we’ve had three four-year crypto cycles in a row is not enough to make a dataset. Yes, it’s a nice pattern, and it’s played out up to now, but I don’t think three times is enough to call it a rule.”
Guy Turner, Coin Bureau livestream with Nic Puckrin, November 4, 2025.
I agree with this assessment, as it’s essentially a lack of statistical significance due to an extremely small sample size.
Additionally, a major component of this cycle is the post-halving bullish sentiment. Now that Bitcoin’s inflation rate is expected to remain relatively stable from now onwards (the rate dropped from approximately 1.7% to around 0.85% at the April 2024 halving), I don’t see how the cycle will continue to hold.
We will still have corrections, but these will be less dramatic than in Bitcoin’s earlier days up until 2020. As the commodity continues growing in market cap, double-digit percentage drops will be the exception, not the norm.
This will also apply to Ethereum as ETH gradually matures.
Unless we experience a dramatic escalation in geopolitical tensions, witness a significant decline in the US economy and other markets, or something drastically and unexpectedly changes with Bitcoin’s blockchain, I believe BTC will set a new all-time high within the next six months.
I will refrain from providing specific price points because it’s all a matter of guesswork.
With considerable volatility in various markets, it’s essential to remain vigilant and informed about diverse events, not only in this space but also in macroeconomics and geopolitics.
Be prepared for anything.
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Disclaimers
• N.B. None of this is financial advice; I am not a financial advisor. You are ultimately responsible for your investments.
• My opinions in this piece may not reflect those of any news outlet, person, organisation, or other entity listed here.
•Please do your due diligence before investing in any crypto assets, staking, NFTs, or other products associated with this space.
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