The Breakdown - When Bitcoin’s Bear Market Might End

Episode Date: May 29, 2026

David maps the current Bitcoin bear market against every prior one — where we are, how much longer it could run, and where the bottom could land. FOLLOW THE SHOW › David — https://x.com/dcanellis › The Breakdown — https://x.com/TheBreakdownBW › The Breakdown Newsletter — https://blockworks.com/newsletter/the-breakdown Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to the Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ DISCLAIMER As always, remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice.

Welcome back to the breakdown, everybody. I'm your host David Canellis. Today, it's going to be a quick one. We're just looking at something specifically about Bitcoin because I've had some request to just focus on the big orange coin. And I mean, if the four-year cycle is still intact and Bitcoin is cyclical, then we must be able to look at the bull and bear cycles to see some information about where we might be headed in the next six months to a year.

So we're going to look at where we are on the bear market chart. So without further ado, let's get to it. Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy or self-securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and interviews expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Host and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Okay, so what I've done here is I have pulled price data for Bitcoin. Really since the beginning, and I'm going to remove some of these lines as we go further. And if you're just listening to the audio-only version, again, I apologize.

I'm going to do my best to convey what I'm seeing on my screen as efficiently as possible. But what we have here is every Bitcoin bear market since 2013, which is basically what you would say probably would be the first legitimate bear market. And they're all plotted on the screen as if they had all started on the same day. And the idea is to compare bear market trajectories and lengths across basically Bitcoin's whole history. And the current bear market, which you would say, and I mean it really depends on how, you define bull and bear markets. This analysis is quite simplistic. It builds on some analysis from iOSG ventures that had teased out the lengths of Bitcoin bull and bear cycles. And if you do all that, you can pull up the exact thing. I think there's a piece in the defiance that

the details their analysis. And I've sort of built on that and adapted that for to, to analyze the current bear market. It's quite simplistic. It counts the start of a bear market as the top of the previous bull market, which would be the most recent all-time high peak. And it ends at the bottom of the bear market, at the bottom of the trough. So you don't really do this analysis in hindsight, because we never really know in the moment when the price has legitimately bottomed. But it's quite a simplistic way of doing it, but it ends up being quite neat. So as you can see on the chart, we are currently at day 235 of the current bear market.

And I'm going to remove the first two bear markets because in my mind, basically, the Bitcoin market really, in its current form, is most similar to what it was in 2018, 2019, 2020. You wouldn't want to go earlier than that because the market dynamics and the players and there was no ETFs and really like the market depth was just so much shallower back then. So I don't really feel it's relevant to bring up what the 2015 bare market was. like for instance. So we're going to start from 2018, so I've removed those. As you can see, this if if the bear market were to end today, it would be the shortest bear market of the four bear markets that were seen on screen. Bear Market 4, which ran from 2019 to 2020 and ended during

the March 2020 COVID crash just after that, that bottomed out at around day 249. The bear market in between 2021 and 2022. So this is the post-FTX bear market that went for 375 days. And the bear market three, which ran from 2018, which ran throughout 2018, went for 360 days. So the median bear market length counting 2018, 2019 and 2021, these three, the median length was 363 days. Bar market five went for 376 days. And the current bear market we're in right now is around 235. days old. So if you were to compare the length of the current Bitcoin bear market to those, to that median, we're at about two-thirds of the way through what would be the Bitcoin bear market. And of course, none of this is an exact science. And I mean, we just don't have that much

history of Bitcoin as an asset. So this is about as closest as we can get to looking at trends and stuff like that. And of course, Bitcoin ball markets are. somewhat of a self-fulfilling prophecy, especially in context of the halving cycle. I'm sure you already know. For more information of this, it's worth going back and checking out a recent breakdown episode with Mark Arjun, the Blockworths Research Analyst and host of the Inflection Point podcast, where we detail why the halving cycle is still relevant at all, considering how much the supply issuance has reduced over time due to those four-year harvings.

But in any case, this will kind of give you some context about where we are on the bear market chart. And it seems to be about two thirds of the way through. Right now, we have retrace, I mean, as of this morning, maybe there's been some market activity between. I've recorded this and uploaded it this morning. But we're at about 41% drawdown right now on day 234. In bare market four, you can see that the COVID crash really accelerated the market downturn for the bear market number four between 2019 and 2020. So at this point in time in the previous bull market, we're only down around 31%, but then over 16 days, the 16 day epic crash around COVID, we saw those losses accelerate, basically double, more than double. in a very short stretch of time.

But there was a Black Swan event. So fingers crossed, we weren't to have another one of those this time around. But as you can see, in bear market three, which was 2018, the bare market just after Bitcoin reached 20,000 for the first time in December 2017 and spent the next year retracing in a bear market. By this point in time in the 2018 bare market, we had lost two thirds of value. So it was much steeper losses the first time around. much steeper losses for that bear market in particular, with a lot of the losses front-loaded, which we'll discuss in a moment. And in the bear market post-FTX between 2021 and 2022, we were at about similar losses.

We're actually about 70% down by this point in the bear market. So the current bear market has been a grinding, slow retracement from the bull market of 2024, leading into the start of 2025. And of course, I mean, something to note that between bear markets three and five, the end of the bear market, the losses were somewhat similar. And it was an 82% retracement while bear market five was a 75% retracement. Bear market four never actually got that bad. There are a lot of macro factors that led to a fast recovery for Bitcoin at the start of 2020 was the Fed pausing rate hikes and all of this stuff. So it's worth noting that in the prior three bear markets on day 235, which is the current day,

the bottom had not yet been reached. But what's different about this bear market in particular is that for bear market three in 2017 and 2018, a lot of the losses were front-loaded. Bitcoin lost 40% of its price in the first 30 days of the bear market. And by day 90, it had lost 59%. and that kind of grinded for months. And after that day 90 period, we went sideways for quite a while before there was a big final capitulation at the end of the year.

And you can see that here starting around day 330, we're at 66% down. And then across another 30 days, we lost another 22%. So that final capitulation is something to look out for. because the same thing happened between 2021 and 2022. You can see that there was months of sideways trajectory before a big capitulation downward. And of course, March 20 saw the same thing, but that was external black swan factors, I would say.

So this time around, so this time around, the trajectory of the current bear market actually looks quite similar to the early phase of bear market. 4, which was the COVID bear market before the big COVID spiral happened. And you can see that the green line and the orange line do kind of share similar trajectories. And we've actually had a similar recovery to what the Sikhs bear market did to the bear market number 4.

Right now, there doesn't appear to be a big black swan event on the horizon. I suppose the more skeptical folk in the audience of the AI bubble, not a bubble, might wonder whether an AI popping would be the equivalent of a Black Swan event for 2026. But again, for these three other bear markets that we're seeing, the moments in the bear market where the worst of the losses happened were actually triggered by a specific shock. We had the FTX collapse for the 2021-20202 bear market. We had the COVID crash for the 2020.

2020 bear market. The 2018 bear market was really kind of hallmarked by this collection of factors like the coin check hack in January 2018. And also like China, this is like peak China banning crypto fud. So there's a lot of different factors rolled into one that led to widespread capitulation for Bitcoin. So all this kind of base the question like, when will the bear market end? And what will the price of Bitcoin be when the bear market?

ends. So, I mean, again, I mean, this is all, I would characterize this as somewhat similar to astrology, but you can't argue with how similar these trends have played out each and every cycle. But what we're looking at, if the current bull market is going to be of a similar length to the previous three, then perhaps this current bear market will run until September or October this year, September or October, 26. And if we're looking at the losses over time, just like how just how price appreciation has shrunk every ball market we are seeing somewhat similar for the bear markets as well actually

so bear market number three in 2018 by the end of the bear market bitcoin has drawn down by 83%. Bear 5 in 2022 drew down by around 76%. So if we're following that means of regression perhaps ban market number six might bottom out at around 68% down, something like that, which if we take that to be a legitimate price prediction, then the price of Bitcoin might reach a bottom of around 39.5K, 40,000 US dollars, which would be about 68% down from the all-time high set at the tail end of 2025, which from here would be another 46% price correction.

Personally, I hope that doesn't happen. I hope that there are enough market forces these days between ETFs, strategy, and so on. That the bottom is, there's a much higher flaw for Bitcoin this time around during the bear market. But as I said, please take all of this with a grain of salt. It is the equivalent of astrology. But it is worth pointing out that the halving cycle has been incredibly consistent. At the time between halving and the peak of the bull market cycle has been really steady. The halving in July 2026, the all-time high came 526 days after that.

The halving in May 2020, the next all-time high ball market happened 548 days after that. And then the fourth halving in April 2024, the bull all-time high came 535 days after that. So very consistent and perhaps we'll see the bare market cycles be consistent as well. But hopefully this gives you some context. It gives you a visual of where we are on the bare market chart. Whatever you want to do with this information is completely up to you. Please do your own research and none of this is financial advice. But please enjoy your weekend and we'll see you next week.

Goodbye.