# Bitcoin Bull Market Cycle Analysis and Valuation

**Podcast:** The Milk Road Show
**Published:** 2026-10-12

## Transcript

But it would point towards the fact that we're about 8.5% of the way through this current bull market.
And Matt Crosby is back with us today.
Matt is the director of research and analytics at Look Into Bitcoin and one of the best on-chain analysts in the entire industry.
Matt is going to explain what's going on with crypto.
He's going to tell us what's happening with Bitcoin.
I have no idea what we're going to cover in this episode, but I know it's going to be good.
If that sounds good to you, make sure you like and subscribe.
Share this episode with somebody who's going to enjoy it.
As a reminder, our podcast today is free and that would not be possible without our wonderful partners at Nexo, the digital asset platform that lets you trade, earn and borrow all in one place, all from one account.
So stay tuned for more information about them later in the episode.
But for now, welcome back to Milk Road Crypto, a longtime friend of the show.
Matt, how are you, sir?
I'm very well, thank you.
How are you?
I'm great, Matt.
It's good to talk to you again.
The last time you were here, Bitcoin was trading at around $64,000 and things are a little bit different today.
We are just under 83k at the time of recording.
Maybe start us out with a high level outlook of your view on Bitcoin here and what's changed in the story so far.
Sure.
So I would like to semi-humbly...
claimed some victory on the previous episode, August 18th, $64,000.
We really timed that to perfection.
Has Bitcoin's price bottomed?
Because I think the next day we pumped about $10,000, which was a lovely surprise.
But big picture, I don't think a whole lot has really changed.
I still maintain that bullish thesis.
Of course, there's going to be ups and downs and chops along the way.
But I feel like a lot of the investors waiting for October the 6th for a one-year bear market.
We're waiting for $50,000.
I think there's very few bearish arguments which really have the legs to stand on, at least based on historical data, based on kind of correlations that we see in equity and commodity markets, based on macro factors, derivative market, technical, all of these things.
We'll dive into it, I'm sure.
But all in all, Bitcoin's looking strong, looking healthy.
This looks very much like a rally off the lows to really kick off the next bull market.
Great.
Okay.
Well, I have a ton of questions.
I read a bunch of your research recently, but before I dive into all that, I know you've prepared a bunch of charts specifically for this episode for our audience.
So I'll just let you take us away, dive into what you've prepared and let's get into this.
A hundred percent.
So my favorite part about these episodes is just the chaos because we don't prep this at all.
John just trusts that I'm just going to give everyone paralysis by analysis and bring 50 different charts to run through, but I promise we'll keep it fairly digestible.
But first and foremost.
Did Bitcoin bottom out?
A lot of people were saying, you know, this time was different.
We didn't have a one-year bear market.
It didn't drop 70, 80%.
But from an on-chain analysis perspective, and this isn't just true for Bitcoin, it's true for all markets.
The thing that drives price higher or lower is supply and demand economics.
And we were seeing signals based on the actual movement of coins.
that there was a very high probability that the low was essentially in.
Now, the clearest indication of that in my mind, and one chart that really visually displays this, is the realized cap hodder waves.
Now, this is the influence on the cost basis or average accumulation price by different age cohorts, which does sound a little bit confusing.
But essentially, at what point have those investors that have held Bitcoin for at least three months influenced at least 80% on kind of that cost basis, the average accumulation on Bitcoin?
This can be viewed in two ways.
It can be viewed in long-term holder conviction or a lack of short-term holder speculation.
But both of them coinciding and kind of being applied simultaneously, especially when this metric surpasses 80%, has always, always marked a Bitcoin bear market low.
Now we can get into a few more data points.
a little bit later, which kind of reaffirmed this because again, we want confluence.
There's no holy grail indicators.
But I think people looking at metrics like these, looking at the absolute seller exhaustion.
I mean, I think we covered this in the last episode, but we had the cold card exploit.
We had the Clarity Act pushback and then rejected.
We had AI bubble causing miners to pivot and sell all the Bitcoin.
We had all of these terrible, terrible...
these bearish catalysts and fundamentals, treasury companies selling, et cetera.
And price continued to march higher.
This was a true dictionary definition of seller exhaustion.
And when we finally did start to see some new capital flowing in, once we start to see that long-term hold of supply of Bitcoin start turning to the downside, indicating that capital was coming in and willing to buy Bitcoin at these prices, like it usually does.
it marked a pretty good opportunity to accumulate Bitcoin preceding some bullish price action.
And that's where we still are.
We really actually haven't seen any signs of exhaustion to the upside, a very overheated, overextended market.
This has been a very healthy, very spot-driven rotation from other markets, equities, bonds, commodities, etc.
into Bitcoin.
And I think this still has a long way to go, of course, the exception being if we have a World War III or a big...
tail event which causes everything to crater and crash but we can't really rely on those basing ourselves on the data working in probabilities i still think there is a very significantly high probability that bitcoin is at a significantly higher price in the not too distant future this pullback on bitcoin is scaring a lot of people and i am not one of them so if you want to see what i'm not selling and why what's on my watch list and when i'm going to be deploying more capital into these markets you can join milkrow pro today it's just a dollar the link is in the description i answer questions day and night in discord i'll see you there Okay, so what I'm hearing you say on these two charts is that long-term holders are showing maximum conviction.
Short-term holders are not coming in to speculate, but there is new capital coming into Bitcoin.
All of that spells a bullish outlook.
Is that a good summary of the information here?
Hit the nail on the head.
Basically, I was rambling for five minutes and you nailed it in 10 seconds.
Perfect.
I try to help synthesize this information.
Okay, great.
I'm with you so far.
Let's keep going.
Let's continue.
So there's two different almost points you want to see.
You want to see long-term holder conviction, but the way we really define long-term holders is just someone who's held Bitcoin for a long enough period of time to basically have a negligible chance of spending it over the next two weeks.
That's what a true dictionary definition long-term holder is.
But you do get a lot of people who just buy the top and then hold until...
the bottom and then capitulate anyway.
Just because you've held Bitcoin for a long time doesn't necessarily mean you're a good investor or a good trader.
The unfortunate reality is most investors are wrong most of the time.
And when we see peak long-term hold of conviction by those that have been in the market for a long period of time, but also...
A similar amount of capitulation by those that were maybe just kind of hoping for a quick buck.
Again, looking at the long-term holder distribution in terms of the spent output profit ratio, the realized profit and losses on chain.
Again, this turning negative indicating a majority of realized movement on chain by long-term holders was occurring at a loss occurred at the bear market lows.
We also...
This chart might look a little bit messy and overwhelming at first.
But if we just focus on the red line, which is the median realized price, a lot of people waiting for Bitcoin to drop beneath the realized price, which was somewhere around $50,000 as Bitcoin was bottoming out.
Now, that is that average accumulation price, that cost basis for all market participants.
But the thing is, that's very much weighted by people that were buying Bitcoin at a fraction of a penny or Satoshi's coins, which haven't moved in well over a decade.
So if we look at the median realized price, which isn't the mean average, it's what 50% of people have paid above this price and 50% have paid beneath this price.
If we look at previous Bitcoin bear markets, and once we drop beneath this medium, again, this is buying when there's blood in the streets and it has marked all of the previous bear markets and it marked this bear market low.
as well.
And if we look at the long-term holder MVRV, so again, isolating for just those more experienced, longer-term holders, potentially more sophisticated investors in the market.
When we look at the MVRV, which is this green line, which is essentially just the price divided by this median long-term holder realized price, the actual experience capitulation was worse than the previous bear market.
So again, I think the argument of, you know, this time was different.
No one could see this coming.
I think if you were looking through a more traditionalist lens, waiting for the seasonality effect, which really doesn't have that much data to back up, it was different.
But I think for those of us within the on-chain space, this ticked all the boxes to say, again, no one can know for certain, but it ticked all the boxes to say there's a good probability at this $60,000 region that your Bitcoin is, buy one, get one, free Satoshi is pretty good value.
Gotcha.
Okay, so what I'm hearing you say here is that based on a lot of on-chain metrics and indicators, all the conditions are that one would be looking for as an on-chain analyst for Bitcoin to have bottomed and its bear market have been met.
And you're kind of saying like, that doesn't guarantee the bottom's in, but the evidence you need to make the argument that the bottom has been put in is now on the table.
Is that what you're seeing here?
100%, yeah.
Gotcha.
Okay, great.
Well, let's keep going.
Let's keep going.
So one of my favorite...
visuals and data points is this one because it doesn't just work for the previous bear market it works for the bull and bear markets now this takes a little bit of explaining but essentially what we're looking towards is the amount of bitcoin that was held by long-term holders when a bull or bear market started now rather than looking at the the cyclical wave so if i just go back to This chart here, rather than looking at the ups and downs individually throughout a cycle, because if we look at the previous Bitcoin bull market, we almost had three distinct waves of selling from long term holders.
As we first ran to 70,000, as we first surpassed 100,000, and as we peaked at that all time high.
Now, if you look at these, you can see, well, we didn't have this big kind of long distribution, this big FOMO influx of speculative capital.
But if you look at it as a cumulative percentage, you take all of those.
down periods in long-term holder supply.
And again, look at that as a percentage from the starting value of long-term holder supply.
That percentage throughout the previous three bull and bear markets has been within a percentage point, practically identical, very interesting, almost behavioral economics that we see.
And if we look at that percentage of long-term holder Bitcoin that has moved so far in this most recent bull market, it's only been about 3.16% of that long-term hold supply.
So if you kind of overlay that onto the three previous cycles, it's actually eerily similar, the rate at which we're actually seeing this distribution, this new inflow of capital to short-term holders.
And if we look at the returns from this point, we're about 50% up.
But given the fact that we're only about 3% of long-term holder distribution, we usually see somewhere around 37%, 38%.
This data point alone, and again, I wouldn't focus on any one data point.
It's always better to react rather than predict.
But it would point towards the fact that we're about 8.5% of the way through this current bull market.
Okay, wow.
So this is interesting.
So this is saying that the bull market has already started, but we're just not even 10% of the way into it.
That's a really interesting data point.
So you're saying that you see data that not only have we bottomed, but the new bull market has fully started here.
I mean, so asterisk next to this, this isn't kind of...
perfectly identifying when the bull and bear markets begin.
This is us kind of retrospectively entering the dates at which these cycles start.
But once you kind of fit in the all-time high price points, the bear market low price points, you can see that we usually see almost an identical amount of movement from long-term holders.
And then overlaying that historical kind of price action related to that distribution, again, it aligns almost perfectly to what we historically see.
Gotcha.
Okay, so it's guaranteed then, basically.
I appreciate the nuance.
I think that's important.
Okay, cool.
But this is helpful to see.
Thank you.
Yes.
And I think, again, it's important just to not look through the lens of on-chain data because there's never going to be a situation in which it nails everything 100%.
There's a little bit of interpretation potentially required.
And realistically, if we saw a huge sell-off in equity markets, if we saw, you know, very unfavorable macroeconomic conditions, it's hard to see a situation in which Bitcoin would really thrive and really have this big bull market if everything else was going down.
I mean, that's the idealistic, you know, Bitcoin fan, Bitcoin, you know, enthusiast ideology.
But is it a reality?
Maybe not.
One thing that I think we really do need to be looking towards, and a lot of people look towards the global M2 data.
I know it's very popular in the previous Bitcoin bull market, but then we kind of diverged.
Global M2 was running to new all-time highs and Bitcoin was lagging behind.
A lot of people thinking that maybe this is a data point which doesn't really matter anymore.
But I think if you look at it on a year-on-year basis and look at the rate of acceleration, the rate of contraction in this global M2, it aligns to Bitcoin's price action significantly more.
accurately.
There's a much higher degree of correlation between these two data points.
And we can see since late 2025, on a year-on-year basis, Global M2 has been in a period of contraction, or at least the rate of acceleration has decreased substantially.
But we can see this bottomed out on July the 2nd, 2026, when Bitcoin's price bottomed out July the 1st.
We can also look at the US dollar strength index, which shows something very similar as well.
And again, rather than looking at the raw value, look at the year on year basis.
When did the DXY top out on a year on year basis, given the fact these are inversely correlated?
July the 2nd, 2026, a day after Bitcoin's price bottomed out.
So again, it doesn't matter if you're looking through an on-chain data standpoint, if you're looking at funding rates, if you're looking at technical standpoints of us bouncing from that 200 week macroeconomic data, all of these in confluence increase the probability of the outcome coming to fruition.
Okay, so there's some macro data you're bringing in this too, not just looking at the on-chain indicators, but looking at other things, liquidity and the value and the strength of the dollar.
And you're saying all of that seems to coincide with evidence that the bottom has happened already and is behind us, and we're now moving into a new bull market.
100%.
Now, one thing we've been working on recently is trying to kind of...
put all of these pieces of the jigsaw puzzle together because it can be overwhelming.
It's very easy.
And I definitely contribute to this to some extent to gain paralysis by analysis.
You know, there's a hundred different charts.
There's certain ways to interpret them.
There's certain nuances of, well, we only really factor this in when that happens, et cetera.
So one thing we've been working on is to try and piece these all together in a way that can kind of dynamically evolve as Bitcoin changes, because clearly.
Bitcoin as an asset is changing.
We've gone from a few billion dollars in market cap to a few trillion dollars.
And the bear markets seemingly are no longer 70, 80, 90% to the downside.
That volatility has been muted.
So what we've tried to do is build what we're naming the confluence framework.
So trying to kind of aggregate the derivatives, the psychology, the inflows, outflows, the macroeconomic data points, and do so in such a way that it can be applicable not just to Bitcoin.
But we can also apply this to equity markets, commodity markets, etc.
And what we can see once we piece all of these puzzles together, as Bitcoin's price was bottoming up beneath $60,000, we basically got the perfect combination from all of these different components of confluence that, you know, we were at a pretty good opportunity to start scaling into Bitcoin.
Now, this is something we're going to be working on.
Again, there's no holy grail indicator.
There's certain things that we're going to need to, you know, continue working and continue improving to make sure.
But again, we wanted to make this actionable.
So each of the kind of six major components that we're basing this analysis on, when you apply them individually, either as a lump sum strategy or as a dollar cost averaging in a strategy, they'll outperform blind lump sum Bitcoin or blind dollar cost averaging into the market.
So I think it's important to focus on the data points which are actionable because I feel like a lot of people in the space are a little bit vague.
They're a little bit, you know.
you know, opaque with their own analysis and we want to be 100% transparent and do it in an open source way.
So that's our current emphasis at look into Bitcoin.
Now that's the sales pitch over.
We can, you know, carry on with the data things there, but it just goes to show that it doesn't matter if you're someone that, you know, really just focuses on the on-chain dates like we do, or if you are more of a macro investor, there's a pretty starting amount of alignment regardless of the lens that you're analyzing Bitcoin through.
Okay, Matt, that was very helpful.
And I think that this combined picture outlook is really helpful.
We at Milk Road Pro and our community have a Milk Road Macro Index indicator that we have as well.
And we're trying to do some other thing here, like trying to bring together a confluence of data and create a single indicator.
that can kind of give a good look at the big picture.
So I think this is really powerful.
And seeing that confluence with the price action really kind of reinforces the thesis here and makes that very clear.
If you're listening, you know, the images look great on this one.
So if you can switch over to YouTube for this episode, I recommend it.
But yeah, the confluence that you see in this combined metric here is really encouraging on the price action.
So yeah, thanks for putting that all together.
It's a great, that's a great tool.
Yeah, 100%.
And again, it's a work in progress.
We're going to continue to try and...
build upon this, I'm sure, like you guys at Milk Road are doing.
And one thing that I think really this reiterates is you want to be a contrarian.
Now, in the previous episode, I mean, your audience is amazing, genuinely great.
But the past few months, it's been a weird time being bullish.
You know, usually in Bitcoin bear markets, once we start seeing some positive price action, people are starting to get a little bit excited again.
This bear market, I have never seen as much anger when we started rallying off the lows.
Now, in retrospect now, people might say, oh, no, I wasn't that person.
But man, that sentiment was some of the lowest I've seen.
And, you know, it's surprising.
And a lot of people, you know, are maybe saying, but the institutions are here.
We should have done X, Y or Z.
Or, you know, when we were looking at the ETFs, the outflows were massive.
There was an obvious kind of reason to be bullish at that point.
But what we can see, again, it doesn't matter if you're a retail investor or an institutional investor.
If you look at the inflows, outflows of the ETFs, for example, on a 28-day average basis, when we see peak outflows, it's usually a good time to do the opposite.
When we see peak inflows, it's usually a good time, again, to do the opposite.
And we did this analysis not just across the Bitcoin ETFs, but across the S&P, the NASDAQ ETFs, GLD, gold ETFs.
Throughout all markets, A majority of investors are unfortunately wrong most of the time.
This is just the mass psychology quantified.
And whether you perceive this as fear and greed or over-exuberance to the upside or whatever it may be, a large part of people's behavior and actions are just highly correlated to the price action.
So it's very difficult to internalize and go against those natural biases that we have.
Because realistically, when Bitcoin was beneath $60,000 and you see a huge plethora of content from influencers and KOLs in the space saying, you know, I think we go to 50K.
I think we bought them in October.
All of these things, it's very hard to take a step back and focus on the data and, you know, unobjectively kind of process this all and take action against that.
So I'm not saying that this is easy and certainly it's not like we nailed exactly where the bottom is or we'll nail exactly where the top is in the bull market.
All we're trying to do is relay the data that we're seeing in an unbiased and uninfluenced way.
And it seems like not only did this work for the Bitcoin bear market low, but right now, again, I still see a lot of value in Bitcoin.
And we're going to try and continue to do that, even at the next bull market peak, whether that's at 150k or 350k when everyone's calling for a million dollar Bitcoin.
At that point, when it...
When people are starting to post about the new orange-colored Lamborghini on Twitter, maybe have a look at the data, maybe check those internal biases and try and react impartially, almost like a data robot to what's really occurring on-chain and through a macro lens.
You know, one of the weird things about crypto is that the longer you're in it, the more accounts you seem to end up with.
You buy in one place, trade somewhere else, earn yield somewhere else, and if you actually need capital, you end up having to sell something that you probably wanted to keep.
That's why we at Milk Road are partnering with Nexo.
These guys keep the whole thing under one account.
You can buy, trade crypto, earn interest on what you already hold, and even borrow against your capital without having to sell it.
All in one spot, all in one account, all on Nexo.
So if you need liquidity, but you don't want to give up your position, or you're already holding crypto and you want to be able to do more with it, I think Nexo is worth your time.
We love working with them.
I think you will too.
Tell them Milk Road sent you.
I really appreciate that perspective, Matt.
And yeah, I think it's important to stay tied to data and what the market is actually telling you rather than emotions, both in bull markets and in bear markets.
And I think that perspective is something that stands out to me about your analysis every time I have you on the show.
So yeah, fully agree on that.
And yeah, I think this is a great data point of looking at how the ETF flows have kind of matched Bitcoin's price movement.
And sticking to that data will help protect you against emotions on Twitter.
Yeah, 100%.
Now, one thing I wanted to cover next was something a little bit more exciting.
And I'm going to be a big hypocrite here because I've just said, react, don't predict.
But it is time to start doing some bull market predictions.
And one for one, I'm calling bear market lows publicly on the channel.
So I think it's time to try and predict how the next bull market could go.
So of course, this is a little bit more speculative.
It's a little bit more fun.
But one thing that I think people are maybe underestimating.
is just how fast Bitcoin can move.
I think people are seeing the fact that the institutions are here, these ETF inflows and outflows, maybe slowing things down.
But we saw how fast Bitcoin went from $64,000 to $84,000.
I mean, blink of an eye, we did the entire first decade or so of Bitcoin's price action when we ran up to 20K.
That took years and years and years for Bitcoin to first reach that.
And then we can jump $20,000 in a couple of weeks now and act like it's nothing.
Bitcoin still has this potential to do the unthinkable.
And a big part of that is due to the fact that a large part is in the hands of long-term holders.
They don't really want to sell.
And this gives us almost this money multiplier impact where $1 of capital coming into the market actually increases the market cap by more than $1.
And just basing it off of this illiquid supply held by long-term holders, it's probably closer to somewhere like a 6.2x.
Now, of course, this is changing every single day.
But what this gives us is a huge opportunity of a relatively small amount of capital rotations out of other markets, maybe out of an AI bubble, maybe out of the bond markets as people lose some confidence.
And a very, very small rotation would actually see a pretty rapid price appreciation period for Bitcoin.
So again, this is something we cover fairly regularly and we've mentioned it many times in these episodes is looking at Bitcoin as a percentage of global capital.
Now, recently, Bitcoin, in the most recent move we had to about $87,000, reached about 0.32%.
So still less than a third of a percentage of all invested global capital.
Now, we peaked at just under half a percent.
But again, you have to keep in mind the liquidity supply is almost constantly expanding and valuations may be getting overinflated in other industries.
So just to reach our previous or, I guess, current all-time high in a percentage of global capital terms.
Bitcoin doesn't need to reach $126,000.
It needs to reach about $134,000.
Now, if we were to reach gold, for example, then we'd be looking at maybe a multi-million dollar Bitcoin.
Is this realistic?
I think in the most recent, in the upcoming bull market, it may be a little bit optimistic.
But if we were to reach even 1% of global capital, that'd be about $281,000 of Bitcoin.
But again, keep in mind that this global capital amount is expanding constantly.
In about 10 years' time, 1% of global capital will be worth over half a million dollars.
Now, I think that's pretty conservative, to be honest, for a Bitcoin target in 10 years' time.
If we were to talk about 3% of global capital, then again, we could be talking around the ballpark of $1.75 million in 10 years' time.
Now, again, this is very speculative, but I have a very intriguing...
kind of comparison we can we can discuss next but i just wanted to hear your inputs if you had any kind of you know thoughts I think this is a very bullish chart.
I'm really glad you shared it with us.
And seeing it put in those terms is a really wild thing to think about, like valuing Bitcoin, not just against the US dollar, but against the total share of global capital or against gold's share of global capital.
And then today versus 10 years from today, that really changes the perspective on the dollar valuation of Bitcoin.
And yeah, I would like to hear more of your thoughts on this because I've had people in our community and people on Twitter start to have this conversation of where do we...
think the cycle top is for Bitcoin here.
I've heard predictions of, you know, somebody gave a range of 170 to 240K and then someone else shot back.
That's way too bearish.
My minimum is 250K to 340K.
So people are all over the place in a wide range of predictions on this.
I'd love to hear more detail from you about where you think that's going to shake out in this next cycle here.
Okay, so I'm hesitant to stamp my name on an exact price point.
I'm an analyst.
I always have to play both sides and always have a get out of jail free card.
But what I will do is give a very interesting comparison and hypothetical scenario of how the Bitcoin bull market could play out.
So if we look at the silver price section, and what I'll do is I'll very quickly just pull that up.
in the previous bull market, that silver experience.
So again, if we look to 2022, very similar to when Bitcoin's price bottomed out.
The silver market cap, and we get this comparison of being a digital gold, but I think this for the time being is a more realistic target.
The silver market cap at the bottom was around $1 trillion.
Bitcoin's market cap has just bottomed out in this most recent bear market at about $1.1 trillion.
In the previous Bitcoin bull market, we had about 700% return, 720, 820.
We did about a 7x in our returns from around $15,000 to $126,000.
Not too bad.
Silver in the previous bull market did about 600% returns, 593%.
So this would still be diminishing returns.
But keeping in mind, we're starting from around the same $1 trillion starting figure.
In about 3.4 years, it did nearly a 7x, well, 6x to about $7 trillion, 1.246% of global capital.
Now, if Bitcoin were to replicate those returns, and we're doing a slightly shorter time frame here, considering the fact that Bitcoin usually moves a bit quicker due to the trading hours available.
So if you look at the calculations, you'll be able to see, you know, we're aligning it by trading hours.
So in 2.3 years, which kind of aligns with the traditional four-year cycle that many would anticipate Bitcoin to play out, that would point to a $400,000 Bitcoin price.
Now, is that a little bit optimistic?
Potentially.
But if we look at the price action that Silver experienced and align those lows, we've been following it pretty closely, actually.
The correlation is about 90% so far throughout this Bitcoin bull market with that run that Silver experienced.
$400,000, if that is a little bit optimistic, we can measure it as the percentage of global capital, about $390,000.
We could look at it as the same multiple of global capital percentage from the lows to the highs, so about 0.227 to about 1.246.
That's a $360,000 Bitcoin.
Or if we just match the market cap that silver experienced at the peak in the most recent bull market, that would still be around a $340,000 Bitcoin.
BlackRock aren't recommending a 1% to 2% allocation of all investors to put their portfolio into silver.
We're not seeing millions, billions of dollars from ETFs going into silver and treasury companies built explicitly for the purpose of accumulating additional silver.
We don't see over 80% of the supply held by long-term holders.
So is this optimistic?
Yeah, I think it's potentially a little bit optimistic.
But is it realistic and a genuine possibility?
I think if the stars align, it's within the realm of feasibility.
Matt, that is wildly bullish.
And I was not expecting you to be so wildly bullish, but I like it.
And, you know, I think I've heard a lot of other people say this, that a lot of investors in the digital asset space have sort of PTSD.
And we've been sort of in a general crypto bear market, you know, outside of Bitcoin for almost five years.
And like Tom Lee said in an interview just this last week, people are not bullish enough.
So maybe some of these price targets sound a little bit moon boy-ish, but they may not be completely outside of what's possible.
Not guaranteed at all, but certainly on the table as possible.
So I really appreciate you laying all that out.
Is there more you want to show on this?
Because the other side of this question for me is, do you have like a bearish, you know, counter side to this of like what the low end of what you might expect from Bitcoin on this cycle would be?
Because I'd like to hear your thoughts on that too.
So I don't have any data to hand on what my kind of bearish outcome would be.
I'm bullish on Bitcoin.
And I do think that a lot of people are maybe...
underestimating what can happen based on the previous cycle, which to many would be underwhelming to see only a 7 or 8x in the Bitcoin price action.
But I think the previous cycle was almost a transitionary phase because in the previous bull market, excluding the last one, they really relied on a huge amount of retail FOMO and an influx of huge amounts of capital.
at those bull market peaks just to provide sufficient liquidity for these OGs, for these large holders, to really just start scaling out their positions without having a huge amount of slippage.
You really required tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars coming in just to not crash the market if you hold 1,000 or 10,000 Bitcoin.
Whereas in the most recent Bitcoin bull market, You weren't selling to retail speculators reliant on stimulus checks or, you know, favorable macroeconomic conditions.
You were selling directly to Michael Saylor and BlackRock, who almost provided these passive flows of millions, billions of dollars every single week that would allow you to sell and not have this big influence on the underlying price and market cap of the asset.
So there was a great article by Geordie Visser calling it Bitcoin's IPO moment.
Typically, when a company goes public, it doesn't immediately skyrocket it.
It's almost a chance to provide the exit liquidity for those early adopters, those early investors, those that took the real risks of adopting and accumulating that asset in the very early days to cash out again without really catering the market or just having the sufficient liquidity to do so.
Whereas this time around, I think Bitcoin has been legitimized and proven to not be a flash in the pan asset.
The fact that we have Wall Street here, the fact that we have the biggest allocators globally, we have pension funds, we have sovereign states.
fighting over accumulating in strategic reserves.
And now investors are aware that Bitcoin isn't just something to speculate on.
It isn't just a high beta play of US equities.
And now there is the means to get this exposure.
There are the inflow potentials through the ETFs or even proxies such as MSDR and other treasury companies.
I really do feel like if we were to break any models in this cycle, It wouldn't be to the downside, but it would be more likely to be to the upside.
I think people expecting continued diminishing returns are underestimating the fiscal irresponsibility that governments globally can really show.
And again, keep in mind that those dollar figures for upside targets are based on dollars in two years, three years time.
That might not be the same purchasing power.
So again, you have to say, If we're giving price targets of $200,000, we can already see if Bitcoin were to reclaim its all-time high at $126,000, that buys you significantly less than it bought you at $126,000 last time.
So we also need to factor in the debasement of fiat currencies.
We're not just long Bitcoin, but we're also essentially shorting these fiat currencies.
But I really do think that Bitcoin at some point is going to turn from a snowball into an avalanche.
And the I don't want to say supply squeeze or super cycle, etc.
But I do think that people are really underestimating the potential that we have this time around.
I really appreciate that perspective, because there's there's a lot of things that I've heard from other guests that have talked about that I've had Jordy Visser on this channel, and we've talked about his bull case to the upside.
Tom Lee, same thing, his price predictions on Ethereum are very, very.
let's say ambitious.
But just like you said, the risk of breaking the models is to the upside here.
And that's something I think people are maybe not discounting enough when they make these kinds of forecasts and estimates.
So thank you for that.
And then the other thing that came to mind when you were talking is gold, right?
When the ETFs for gold launched, gold as an asset was around $2 trillion.
Matt Hogan of Bitwise, who's been on the channel a couple of times in the last couple of weeks, given great interviews, but he always talks about how when those ETFs launched, gold was around $2 trillion in market cap.
And now it's seasoned to the market and people have gotten used to those vehicles and now gold's at like 30 trillion or something.
So yeah, there's a lot of upside here that I think people overlook.
Matt, let's bring this back to Q4 of 2026 because I really appreciate the outlook on what's possible over the coming cycle.
But what's your outlook for the rest of this year?
And where do you think Bitcoin goes from here?
Any catalyst you're watching?
Just give me some thoughts on the outlook for the short term here.
Sure.
So I think...
The Bears, I mean, the Bears, I was going to say their last stand, but they do love moving the goalposts.
First, it was we'll bounce back from the 50-week, then we'll bounce from the local highs, then we'll bounce from the 100-week.
They're always moving the goalposts.
But I think above the 100 weekly moving average, essentially the two-year moving average, it's currently around $90,000.
Above that, there's very little upside resistance.
But I will say there is a certain degree of...
mean reversion that is to be expected, or at least, you know, calming and, you know, recuperating after a, you know, 50% move to the upside in a very short space of time.
And Bitcoin, you know, as much as we've talked about how it can surprise people to the upside and how it can provide these, you know, huge asymmetric returns, if we look at the previous bull market, there were three separate instances where price essentially did nothing for at least six months.
We spend a lot of time just kind of flatlining.
It's very typical for Bitcoin.
It's only a very short percentage of days or a very small percentage of days, I should say, where we have these big, massive returns to the upside or downside.
And most of the time we are kind of just being a little bit boring, kind of re-anchoring people's expectations of what fair valuations for Bitcoin are.
And I think the institutionalization of that is only going to exacerbate kind of these transitionary periods where we flatline around.
$80,000 potentially, allow people to reset their minds and think, okay, that's a fairly reasonable price and start scaling in.
So I think new all-time highs would be a little bit optimistic.
I think earlier in the year, I said $100,000 before the end of the year was a possibility, and I do stand by that being the case.
But realistically, after multiple consecutive months of green candles, you'd expect just a little bit of a cool off.
Now, I'm not a big seasonality player.
I'm not thinking, well, it's October, we have to go up because we always go up.
But realistically, as I said, a 50% pump to the upside, usually we cool off a little bit.
And if we look at the previous Bitcoin bull market, which looked incredibly similar as we rallied off the lows through that one year moving average through that 50 week, retesting that previous all time high, that was very typical.
It was very bullish to almost have this dip to the downside and big rebound.
We haven't really experienced anything like that yet.
We have the 200 daily moving average and the short-term holder realized price around $75,000.
But again, they're rising every single day.
It wouldn't surprise me to have a little bit of a sell-off, a little bit of a cool-down, reset expectations, give the Bears just a glimmer of hope before the final slaughtering, and then we can really rally to end the year, potentially into six-figure territory, which I would like to see.
And I don't want to speculate on exactly how 2027 is going to play out.
We could be delayed due to mid-term uncertainties.
There could be escalations in the Middle East.
There's all of these unknowns.
But I will say, From a macro, derivative, technical, psychological standpoint, if you just zoom out and look at where we are in the cycle, I think there's no reason to be bearish here.
Maybe you're a bit sidelined and you're a bit angry, so you're kind of wishing for slightly higher prices, slightly lower prices, I should say, sorry.
But the way I'm looking at it is if you look at something like the Bitcoin investor tool, which is simply just a two-year moving average.
And if you were to look at where we currently are, which is beneath this, as it sits around $90,000, if you look at all the previous instances of Bitcoin beneath this, clearly it was deep valuation territory.
It was a great opportunity to buy.
And if you look at people who were waiting for this to break above before accumulating in all the previous cycles, you don't look back and laugh at them because they didn't nail the low.
You don't look back at people who had a cost basis of 30K in the last cycle and think, Man, you must be gutted that you didn't buy at 15K.
No, it was a great entry price.
If you look at the previous cycle, again, it was about a 2X off the lows.
It's about $6,500 after we bottomed it, you know, just above $3,000.
No one looks back and regrets those accumulation opportunities.
Same in the previous cycle, about $400 after bottoming out at around $200.
It's still valuation territory.
And if you believe Bitcoin is this asset that's going to reach one...
plus percent of global capital, which is still a tiny fraction.
I mean, all of the largest allocators and big capital managers in the world are suggesting a multiple percentage portfolio allocation to this asset.
And that's only going to grow.
And the money multiplier effect being so high, 1% to 2%, it's still multi-millions of dollars per Bitcoin.
So if you do think Bitcoin is going to reach seven-figure territory, then really you need to be looking at this as a 99.2%.
2% discount rather than being salty that you weren't able to accumulate a few percentage points lower.
Matt Crosby, thank you so much for coming on Milko Crypto.
I really appreciate your data-driven analysis and your clear-headed and calm view of these markets here at a time when there's so many emotions going in both directions and so many fears to the downside and wild numbers to the upside.
It really helps to have that grounded outlook.
So our audience at Milko Crypto loves you, and I always appreciate having you on.
Thanks for being here.
Where can we send people to find more of you and your work online?
Sure.
So if you go to look into Bitcoin on Twitter or YouTube or the website, you'll find all of our analysis, all our charts, et cetera.
And for me personally, if you go at MacCrosbyPro, you'll find my other pieces that I like to put out.
And if you're heading to any conferences soon, I'll be at Bitcoin Apps in a few weeks time.
And there's Benjamin Cowan's conference in just over a month in Miami into the Cryptoverse.
So if you're there, definitely come say hello.
My favorite part about being in the space is actually going to these events, meeting people, coming on podcasts and just talking to people like yourself and like-minded people just to, you know, who really have the vision and kind of a shared goal in, you know, spreading the word of Bitcoin.
Not like it's a cult or anything, but, you know, just trying to educate people on, you know, monetary debasement.
freedom and censorship resistant money and all those good things.
Yeah.
If you're around, please reach out.
I'd love to connect.
Well, thank you so much for being here, Matt.
I'm really looking forward to having you on again soon.
And I will hopefully cross paths with you at some of these conferences soon.
But in the meantime, thanks so much for being here.
I really appreciate it.
Always a pleasure.
Looking forward to the next one.
Thank you all for joining us.
I hope you all learned something today and got a little bit more bullish.
I know I did.
So until next time, stay safe, stay educated, stay bullish, and we will see you all on the next episode of Milk Road Crypto.
Thanks for being here, everyone.
Bye.
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