- Bitcoin has broken out of its September range, though short-term momentum looks stretched.
- CryptoQuant’s CEO expects this cycle to multiply its low three to five times, well short of past tenfold runs.
- He ties the smaller swings to a larger market and growing institutional ownership.
- Holders as a group stayed in profit through the entire 2026 decline, according to CryptoQuant’s MVRV data.
Bitcoin broke out of a month-long range in recent days and touched $87,484 before easing to about $85,800, and the move arrived alongside a call from CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju that the current bull cycle will be smaller than any before it. Ju said on Tuesday that he expects BTC to gain three to five times from its low, well short of the tenfold-plus runs of past cycles, with a milder bear market to follow, because institutional capital now dampens moves in both directions. Even after rising about 13% in seven days and roughly 48% from its June low, Bitcoin still trades some 32% below its October 2025 record of $126,296.
Bitcoin clears its September ceiling as momentum runs hot
For most of the past month, sellers capped Bitcoin between roughly $75,000 and $82,300. That range broke within a single session, when the price jumped from about $81,000 to above $86,000 on the heaviest volume since the August rally. Wednesday’s candle tested $87,278 and slipped back to $85,776. Sellers still defend the area just below $88,000. CryptoQuant’s own weekly report puts the next resistance at $88,000 to $90,000, where the upper band of the trader realized price sits, and places firm support at the 200-day moving average near $70,600. The same report says the firm’s Bull Score has held in bullish territory since mid-August and now reads 80.
The daily RSI stands at 70.5, which means buyers have dominated recent sessions by a wide margin and the price has run well ahead of its short-term average. The last time the reading pushed above 80, in mid-August, Bitcoin did not extend higher. It spent the following four weeks inside the range it has just left.
Both moving averages point upward, with the 20-day near $79,600 and the 50-day near $74,586, and the gap between them has widened steadily since mid-August. A Fibonacci retracement drawn from the June low to the recent high marks where pullbacks have the best chance of meeting buyers.
Why a $1.7 trillion asset cannot repeat the 2017 math
Bitcoin carries a market value of about $1.72 trillion, and a tenfold move from the June low near $57,800 would require a valuation above $11.5 trillion. In early 2015, Bitcoin’s entire market value was below $3 billion.
Ju argues that the composition of ownership matters as much as the size. When retail traders dominated, leveraged buyers could push the price far beyond its fundamentals, and forced liquidations then accelerated the reversal. He points to that dynamic as the source of the 80% crashes. ETF issuers, public companies holding BTC on their balance sheets and allocation-driven funds trade on mandates and rebalancing schedules, which tends to slow both the climb and the fall.
The institutional channel has worked in both directions this year. Strategy sold 1,690 BTC in August, and earlier in the downturn $1.55 billion left spot Bitcoin ETFs across six consecutive trading days in mid-May. The flow has since turned: spot Bitcoin ETFs took in nearly $1 billion on Monday, one of the ten largest daily inflows on record. Big holders cut both ways, and a single treasury company’s sale can outweigh weeks of retail buying. They can also become a concentrated source of supply when conditions turn.
Ju frames the trade-off as a feature. Giving up the parabolic upside also removes the 80% collapse, and in his view that combination attracts patient, long-horizon capital. He connects it to the original design of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, arguing that an asset with milder swings stands a better chance of functioning as money.
The PnL Index backs the thesis on tops, less clearly on bottoms
The PnL Index measures how profitable Bitcoin holders are in aggregate. CryptoQuant’s 365-day moving average smooths out short-term noise, so each peak and trough on the chart corresponds to a full cycle.
The tops follow Ju’s argument closely. The average peaked near 0.85 in both the 2013 and 2017 cycles, reached roughly 0.8 at the 2021 top and then managed only about 0.35 in 2025. Holders made far less money on paper at the most recent peak than at any previous one.
The bottoms tell a messier story. The trough near -1.45 in 2015 gave way to a much shallower one around -0.75 in 2019, which fits the pattern, but the 2022-2023 trough fell to roughly -0.95. One cycle broke the sequence.
The moving average currently sits around -0.2 after rolling over from its 2025 high, and Ju says it is forming an inflection. Because a 365-day average reacts late by construction, a turn in this line usually confirms a change the price has already made.
Holders stayed in profit through a 54% drawdown
MVRV compares Bitcoin’s market value with its realized value, which prices every coin at the level where it last moved on-chain. A reading above 1 means the average holder sits on an unrealized gain. In the 2018 and 2022 bear markets, the ratio dropped below 1 and the market as a whole went underwater.
According to Ju, that never happened this time. Even at the June low near $57,800 on Binance’s daily chart, Bitcoin traded above the average on-chain cost basis of its holders. Buyers near $126,000 took heavy losses; the aggregate did not.
He lists three more signals behind his view. His post charted only the PnL Index, so the points below are CryptoQuant’s reading of its own data rather than figures readers can check in the post.
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Set against earlier cycles, the compression is visible in both the rallies and the declines that followed them.
What three to five times would mean in dollar terms
Ju did not state which low he measures from. Counted from the 2022 bottom, Bitcoin has already delivered about 8x, so the only reading that works is the June 2026 low near $57,800.
On that base, a 3x cycle implies a peak around $173,000 and a 5x cycle one near $289,000, equal to market values of roughly $3.5 trillion and $5.8 trillion at today’s supply. This is arithmetic applied to his range. He gave no timeline and no price target.
After a 48% rebound, the low end of Ju’s range leaves about 2x of upside from $85,800, and the high end about 3.4x. Investors who arrive now inherit only part of the cycle he describes.
What a compressed cycle changes for investors and lenders
Position sizing is the most direct consequence. A portfolio built for a 10x cycle can tolerate a small allocation and an 80% drawdown. If Ju is right, both the reward and the risk shrink, which makes Bitcoin easier to hold in larger weights and harder to treat as a lottery ticket.
Lenders that accept BTC as collateral set loan-to-value limits around historical drawdowns, and a bear market that stops near 50% supports higher borrowing limits, provided the 2026 pattern repeats in the next downturn.
The thesis also collides with calendar-based models that many traders still follow. Analysts who time cycles from the halving place the historical window for a bear market trough between September and November 2026, counted from the October 2025 peak, while Ju’s data implies the low is already behind the market. The next significant correction will settle it: if MVRV holds above 1 again and realized capitalization keeps climbing, the structural shift he describes gains a second data point well before the next halving, due around April 2028.