MarketsBitcoin
|8 min ReadBitcoin Bulls Eye Extended Cycle Into 2026
Maya Chen
Senior Analyst
Published
Jan 16, 2026
Bitcoin just delivered one of the fastest and ugliest drawdowns of this cycle, falling roughly 36 percent from 125,000 to around 80,000 dollars in six weeks. Many traders called the top and declared the four year halving script complete. Murad, the former meme supercycle star of the last cycle, is taking the opposite side. He argues this is a mid cycle reset inside a much longer bull market that can stretch four and a half to five years, potentially into 2026.
In a long podcast he walked through 116 separate signals. They cluster into four buckets: price structure, on chain capitulation, derivatives and ETF positioning, and a macro and political backdrop that, in his view, still favors hard assets over time. For traders in São Paulo, Dubai or Riyadh, the message is simple. Treat the 80,000 zone as a contested support area, not confirmed macro top territory, and plan for a noisy but unfinished cycle.
From 125k Crash To A Mid Cycle Reset
On the pure chart side, Murad frames the 36 percent decline as violent but not unprecedented. This cycle has already seen 32 and 33 percent pullbacks, and the current low still fits inside a higher low structure on higher time frames. Bitcoin has just retested a two week demand zone and sits on the lower rail of a rising channel that began in 2023. On a longer logarithmic view, the price has again tagged a diagonal support that has guided the market since 2013.
Momentum tools are screaming stress rather than euphoria. Weekly RSI has dropped to levels last seen at the 2018 bear low, the Covid crash and the 3AC or Luna collapse. Daily RSI is at a two and a half year low. Price has traded three and a half to four standard deviations below the 200 day moving average, a zone only visited around the 2018 and Covid bottoms. MACD on one, two and three day charts is near historic extremes. In his framework, those are the kind of readings that accompany panic, not tops.
He also highlights a diagonal across all pullback lows this cycle that forecast an eventual bottom near the mid 80,000s when price was still around 95,000. The actual low around 80,500 sits close to that path. At the total market cap level, crypto as a whole has slid back to its 200 day exponential average and into both horizontal and diagonal support. The technical story is not of a broken uptrend but of a steep retest after a huge rally from 15,000.
On Chain Capitulation And ETF Lock Up
Under the surface, the selling looks more like trader capitulation than long term distribution. On Glassnode style measures, most of the recent supply hitting the market came from short term holders and leveraged traders, not miners or deep cold storage wallets. The share of short term holders in profit is at a five year low, their supply is near record lows, and their realized profit to loss ratio has collapsed. SOPR for this group is sliding into what he calls a buy zone, while realized losses are the largest since the Silicon Valley Bank shock in 2023.
Exchange flows tell a similar story. Spot platforms have seen one of the largest net outflows of coins on record, a pattern that has historically aligned with the start of bull markets or the end of large bear legs. Realized net profit and loss is back to levels last seen at the FTX failure. SOPR for the wider market has not printed the kind of spikes usually associated with cycle tops and has stayed in a bullish band around one since 2023.
Stablecoins sit at the center of his thesis. Supply has been in what he calls a supercycle for three years, stablecoin dominance is back at levels previously associated with medium term Bitcoin lows, and the stablecoin supply ratio and its oscillator are at extremes not seen since 2017. In short, there is plenty of dry powder for dip buying if sentiment turns.
Derivatives, ETFs And Positioning Imbalance
Derivatives data are messy but tilt toward fear. Recent weeks saw some of the largest long liquidations since FTX, pushing open interest in Bitcoin futures down from about 37 billion to 29 billion dollars. On many venues, the liquidation profile now shows more fuel above price than below, with a larger cluster of potential short squeezes overhead. Funding rates flipped negative for the first time in weeks, and aggregate long or short ratios around 0.93 suggest traders are heavily leaning short.
Options markets echo that mood. Put buying dominates, put skew has climbed, and put implied volatility trades well above call implied volatility. For Bitcoin, the November and December max pain levels sit around 102,000 and 99,000 dollars, well above spot. For Ether, a large max pain level sits near 4,300 dollars in June. The week of the crash also delivered record put volume in IBIT, the largest spot Bitcoin ETF, and the single highest trading day ever for Bitcoin ETFs as a group, plus record volume in Hyperliquid Bitcoin perpetuals. That cocktail looks like a capitulation flush rather than quiet distribution.
The ETF picture is central to his extended cycle argument. He estimates that roughly 98 percent of ETF assets are held by investors who have not sold through the 36 percent drawdown and who are structurally long only. Bitcoin briefly traded in the 79,000 to 82,000 dollar range, which he identifies as the cost basis and realized price band for the ETF cohort. Several metrics cluster between 79,000 and 85,000 dollars, including ETF cost basis, realized price and a market wide fair value estimate near 80,200. When multiple fair value anchors overlap, he treats it as a support shelf, not a distribution zone.
He also notes that ETF ownership of the Bitcoin supply has risen from roughly 3 percent to more than 7 percent in about two years. In his mind, that can extend to 15 to 25 percent over time as passive fiat flows grind into a fixed supply asset. A similar but smaller pattern is emerging in Ether products. For holders of altcoin heavy portfolios in Brazil or the Gulf, the implication is that the marginal buyer is increasingly institutional, while the marginal forced seller is often a listed proxy like MicroStrategy or Metaplanet that just saw its premium collapse toward or below one.
Macro, Politics And The Long Cycle Bet
The most controversial part of Murad's case is the macro overlay. He points out that this has been the hardest environment in Bitcoin's history, with policy rates starting at 5.5 percent and still above 4 percent, compared with near zero in earlier cycles. Even in that setting, Bitcoin climbed from about 15,000 to 125,000 dollars. Now rate cut odds for December have jumped from roughly 30 to more than 80 percent. At the same time, the S and P 500 and Nasdaq 100 just posted some of their highest daily and weekly volumes since 2022, with RSI and breadth measures in oversold territory that historically precede higher prices over three to twelve months.
He connects Bitcoin closely to global M2. In 2017 and 2021, parabolic Bitcoin rallies coincided with explosive money supply growth. In this cycle both curves are rising more slowly. If money growth accelerates into 2026 while the Federal Reserve winds down quantitative tightening around December 2025 and later flirts with some form of new easing, he expects another strong Bitcoin leg. He also highlights a dollar index sitting near a major resistance band that has flipped between support and resistance since 2015, plus fresh easing signals from China and a 135 billion dollar stimulus package from Japan.
Politics enters the thesis through United States policy. Murad sees the current US administration as unusually friendly to Bitcoin, ETFs and stablecoins, while also pushing for looser financial conditions through rate cuts, softer bank capital rules and housing initiatives that unlock home equity. Proposals for broad based stimulus checks or tax rebates would simply pour more liquidity into an already financialized system. For crypto holders in emerging markets, that combination of US policy, Asian stimulus and growing ETF ownership looks, in his telling, like fuel for a longer cycle.
He is not blind to risk. He flags four big ones: a sudden collapse in the mega cap artificial intelligence equity trade, renewed aggressive selling by large Bitcoin whales, a strong dollar surge and a global business cycle relapse that drains liquidity. If those hit together, 80,000 could fail. His core view, however, is that none of the classic thirty cycle top indicators have triggered and that the time axis of this bull market is likely to extend beyond the neat four year template.
Disclaimer: This document is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only. The views expressed in this document are not, and should not be taken as, investment advice or recommendations. Recipients should do their own due diligence, taking into account their specific financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, which are not considered here, before investing. This document is not an offer, or the solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any of the assets mentioned.