The Pomp Podcast - Is Bitcoin In A Bear Market? | Anthony Pompliano

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

In this solo episode, Anthony Pompliano explores a key question facing investors today: Is Bitcoin in a bear market? He breaks down the recent drawdown, explains why this cycle looks different, and discusses how Wall Street adoption, shifting inflation expectations, and global risk dynamics are reshaping Bitcoin’s price action.======================Simple Mining makes Bitcoin mining simple and accessible for everyone. We offer a premium white glove hosting service, helping you maximize the profitability of Bitcoin mining. For more information on Simple Mining or to get started mining Bitcoin, visit https://www.simplemining.io/======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 80+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $1,000 in rewards.======================As markets shift, headlines break, and interest rates swing, one thing stays true — opportunity is everywhere. At Arch Public, we help you do more than just buy and hold. Yes, our dynamic accumulation algorithms are built for long-term investors… but where we really shine? Our arbitrage algos — designed to farm volatility and turbocharge your core positions. The best part of Arch Public’s products is they are free! Yes, you heard that right, try Arch Public for free! Take advantage of wild moves in assets like $SOL, $SUI, and $DOGE, and use them to stack more Bitcoin — completely hands-free. Arch Public is already a preferred partner with Coinbase, Kraken, Gemini, and Robinhood, and our team is here to help you build smarter in any market. Visit Arch Public today, at https://www.archpublic.com, your portfolio will thank you.======================0:00 - Is bitcoin in a bear market?7:28 - Why is this bear market different? 17:29 - Conclusion: where does bitcoin go from here?20:41 - CFO Silvia 

This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales. Using automation, analytics, and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more at Accenture.com slash Spotify. If you pull a muscle, all of a sudden you realize how often you use that muscle. So the bladder is exactly like that.

When it's working well, we don't think about it. But when it's not working properly, you're getting up at night, or in the cases of many men, you may have some leakage. If this is something that's affecting your quality of life, there are really good solutions these days. Depend makes the guard and the shield. The shield would be if you have some leakage on occasion, if you have heavier leakage, you could use the guard.

One of the most important questions in Bitcoin right now, is Bitcoin in a bear market? The reason why a lot of people are asking that is because they're trying to figure out what happened. We went up to $126,000, set a brand new all-time high, and then we came crashing down. We recently hit $75,000 in Bitcoin's price. That's a 40% decline. Obviously, that's got a lot of people shook. Now, if you've been around, you know that Bitcoin is likely to be very volatile. We have seen things like a 30% drawdown four, five, six times in bull markets. And so some people are saying, wait, we're actually not in a bear market. We simply are just seeing normal drawdowns as we continue to go higher, $150,000, $200,000, $250,000.

I don't agree with those people. I think that Bitcoin is in a bear market, but it might be a different type of bear market than you're used to. So let me explain what are some of the things that I think are happening here. The first is that there is an entire cohort of people that subscribe to the four-year cycle. This idea that the halving drives the price up, then there is some sort of correction, we then have these 80% drawdowns, and then we kind of repeat the process over and over again.

It's happened multiple times in the past. These individuals continue to subscribe to this idea. Now, the reason why I think that the four-year cycle is interesting is because I do believe that the halving has an impact on price. If you have a supply shock to an asset and demand stays constant,

then you are likely to see higher prices. What I think is a little bit different though is that the four-year cycle can remain, yet we can still have different severities in terms of the appreciation and the decrease in price. That's just volatility disappearing. And we know that Bitcoin used to be an 80 vol asset, but now it's only a 40 vol asset.

And so if you've cut volatility in half, you should expect less on the upside and less on the downside. Now, another reason why I think that Bitcoin is likely to be in a bear market right now, other than just the price is down a lot and the four-year cycle folks are pretty well timed in calling the top last October,

is that we also understand that Bitcoin is becoming financialized. Now, as Bitcoin has entered into the Wall Street world, what we are watching is all of these firms try to figure out, how do I take my type of strategy, apply it to Bitcoin, where there's lots of volatility and lots of alpha, and extract economic value for me and my investors?

We originally saw public companies adopting it with strategy and others. We then saw the ETFs become very popular. Asset managers are simply saying, hey, I can take a 25 basis point fee on helping people buy Bitcoin, and that I can continue to take that year after year after year. So there was an economic incentive for them to do so. But now we're seeing things like covered call strategies that are going out as ETFs from those same asset managers. We also are seeing the

introduction of other types of options into the market. And so now people can hedge, they can apply different types of pressure, both on the downside or upside of Bitcoin. The financialization of Bitcoin is going to temper volatility, in my opinion. And that's what we've been seeing, both in terms of the launches of these products and the adoption by the consumer, but also in the decreasing volatility. Now, the other thing that I think is really important here that people aren't talking about is I believe that markets are forward-looking. Actually, I would argue that that is just how markets operate. It doesn't matter what my opinion is. Markets try to look forward and investors say, based on what I believe is going to happen,

I want to act today rather than wait. So if you go back to 2020 and 2021, when people thought that there was going to be high inflation because of undisciplined government spending, what did they do. They said, I'm going to buy Bitcoin today. I'm going to buy gold today. I'm going to buy inflation hedges before the inflation shows up. I'm going to prepare my portfolio. And that was a really good decision. Stanley Druckenmiller, Paul Tudor Jones, and many others, along with everyday individuals, all were preparing for inflation that eventually came, but they bought the assets before. And so Bitcoin had run from 10,000 to 60,000 before high inflation ever showed up. And that is because markets are forward looking. Now, if you fast forward to just last

year we saw bitcoin run up when the trump administration got elected the price of bitcoin was about 70k that's 70 000 ran up to 126 000 in less than a year and so there was a belief that oh wait a second tariffs are coming and if tariffs are going to actually get implemented then there should be high inflation if high inflation shows up then this bitcoin thing should serve as a great store of value and an inflation hedge and therefore the market repriced did higher. There was also the belief that the strategic Bitcoin reserve, a friendly government, many other factors could be a huge tailwind for Bitcoin. So it's not that Bitcoin didn't work. It's actually that Bitcoin did work. Bitcoin went up quite a bit in a very short period of time.

But then in October, it peaked and it started to come down. And so one of the aspects that I think is happening is I think the market is looking forward and they realize that inflation is not going to be a problem. Instead, the bigger risk is deflation. And if deflation is going to be a problem, then your store of value assets, they actually lose value. And you don't have to worry about your inflation hedge. Instead, you've got to look for things that are productive and are able to actually benefit from that deflationary force. And so you could make a very strong argument, and I think I would make an argument, that one component of the reason why Bitcoin's price has gone down is because the market understands that the high inflation that we

were promised is not coming. It is not going to be a problem for the next couple of years. And in fact, deflation may be a bigger risk. And so it's simply pricing in that scenario. I think that if that is true, which I believe it is, if that is true, then you can start to put together a couple of these factors. There is the four-year cycle. There is the markets are forward-looking. There's all these components that line up with why Bitcoin's price is going down. Now, on top of that, I have seen people online talk about mining hash rate falling. There's always been this question as to, is mining hash rate the leading indicator for price, or is price the leading indicator for mining hash rate? Put aside that debate for a second.

and I'll let people smarter than me try to answer it. But what I do believe is that people need to dig into the data sometimes. And yes, there has been a significant decline in mining hash rate over the last two weeks. But a big reason why is because as the miners have become more sophisticated, specifically in North America, they have started to actually do demand response or try to stabilize grids. So when it gets really cold outside, the grid has lots more people pulling energy from it. They're turning on their heat.

They're using electricity more. And so the miners have a decision. I can keep mining Bitcoin, or I can shut off my Bitcoin miners, and I can provide power back into the grid and get paid for it. It's a simple economic calculation. If I'm going to get paid more by selling the power back into the grid, rather than mining Bitcoin, I'm going to shut my machines off, I'm going to put it back into the grid. And so when we had this really big kind of Arctic storm that went across the United States,

it affected huge areas of Bitcoin miners. And we saw a lot of miners start to report the fact that they were shutting off their machines and that they were going and putting the power back into the grid. that grid stabilization is a good narrative for Bitcoin miners, because it means that they're being responsible kind of citizens and corporations in their local communities. But more importantly, is it explains why Bitcoin's hash rate came down. And so I don't actually think the Bitcoin hash rate coming down has as big of an impact on price as people want it to be. But I think it's worth paying attention to. And obviously, we want to avoid any sort of issue. That's why we have the

Bitcoin kind of difficulty adjustment and many other aspects to make sure that we can continue to incentivize people to mine Bitcoin, keep the security of the network up. So you've got all of these different components that are coming together. Now, what I find interesting is that PolyMarket, the current odds on Bitcoin trading below $65,000 in 2026 is at 72%. That's a pretty big number. That means that more than half of people who are on PolyMarket, the prediction market, believe that Bitcoin will trade below $65,000. Now, if you remember, I promised you that I was going to explain why this bear market may still be a bear market, but just not be like past bear markets. And one part of it is that volatility we were talking about. If Bitcoin

was an 80 vol asset, now it's only 40. It's a 50% reduction in volatility. Then rather than get an 80% drawdown in price, you should get about a 40% drawdown in price, right? Just kind of back of the napkin math. If that's the case, then the drawdown that we've seen would be about the whole move, somewhere in that $75,000 range. Now, I'm not claiming that that was the bottom. I'm not claiming that. I've got a strong opinion on this. But I do think that if you get the volatility cut in half, then the drawdown should be about half. And so we're somewhere in that ballpark now. And I think the next couple of weeks will be very important to understand, is it likely to be a bigger drawdown? Or should we just be able to take the volatility levels and then assign it to

Bitcoin levels and understand where that market bottom is likely to be. Now, the other thing that I'm paying attention to here is bear markets can always get worse if there is stress in the market. And where could that stress come from? In the last cycle, we saw a lot of lending. There's a lot of rehypothecation of Bitcoin. And once you had some sort of issue, then all of a sudden, there's this contagion. And it set off this kind of chain effect across all these different companies. We saw companies go bankrupt. We saw lots of funds come under immense duress. There was all these issues that people had to try to work through. And in that process, that led to lots of selling. People wanted to sell Bitcoin to raise cash. They wanted liquidity in US dollars.

And so all that sell pressure and capitulation drove the price lower and lower and lower until finally we had bottomed sub 20K in the last cycle. Now, 70,000 to 20K was right in line with those same kind of 80% drawdowns. One of the areas where I could see there being issues or stress showing up in the future are these Bitcoin treasury companies. Now, I'm intimately familiar with them, right? I've evaluated a lot of them. We've got a public company that's got Bitcoin on its balance sheet, et cetera. But what I think is important is not just, oh, there's public companies with Bitcoin on their balance sheet. It's more important to look at what are the terms of any debt that they have. And the reason why that's important is because if somebody becomes

a for seller in 2022, they were a for seller because of the contagion or in 2026 because of some debt that they have that forces them to sell the Bitcoin at an inopportune time, then that is where that kind of capitulation sell pressure could come from. Now, most of the debt in the public market is not going to be kind of aligned with that type of situation. Instead, a lot of times there's, you know, longer duration debt. There usually is some sort of convert component to it i don't see a lot of these companies right now taking out loans against their bitcoin where there's liquidation type risk um and so so far in general i don't see the risk that you'd be worried about in these companies but again it's something to continue to pay attention to because if we get

in a scenario where all of a sudden we have companies that are saying listen i have to sell the bitcoin on my balance sheet because of some sort of debt covenant or some sort of liquidation risk that would then lead to that kind of capitulation cell pressure and push the price lower lower lower today's episode is brought to you by simple mining have you ever been interested in mining bitcoin as a miner myself i've been using simple mining for the past few months and the experience has been nothing short of seamless i mine with the pool of my choice and the bitcoin is sent directly to my wallet simple mining which is based in cedar falls iowa offers a premium white glove service designed for everyone from individual enthusiasts to large

scale miners they've been in business for four years and currently operate more than 20 000 Bitcoin miners, including mine. Their electricity is over 65% renewable thanks to the abundance of wind energy. Not only do they simplify mining with their top-notch hosting and on-site repair services, but they also help you benefit financially by running your operations as a business. This approach offers 100% bonus depreciation to optimize the profitability of your investment. Do you ever worry about the completion of maintaining your mining equipment? They've got you covered there too. For the first 12 months, all repairs are included at no extra cost. If you experience any downtime, they'll credit you for it as well. And if your miners

aren't profitable at the amount, simply pause them with no penalties. When you're ready to upgrade or adjust your setup, their exclusive marketplace provides a seamless way to resell your equipment. Join me and many satisfied miners who have simplified their Bitcoin mining journey. You can even get started today with a seven-day miner trial. Visit simplemining.io slash pomp to get started today. That's simplemining.io slash Pomp to get started today. With Simple Mining, they make it simple. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in that retirement account? Then listen up. This message is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for

retirement. They're helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 80 cryptocurrencies with world-class customer service, military-grade encryption, and a vertically integrated licensed trust company. It's no wonder more than 200,000 Americans trust Bitcoin IRA to secure their financial future. Getting started is quick and easy. It takes just three minutes to open an account. Once you're set up, their team of IRA specialists will reach out to guide you through every step of the process. Whether you're transferring an IRA from a legacy bank, rolling over an old 401k, or starting fresh with new contribution, the Bitcoin IRA team is here to help you access real crypto in your retirement account. And here's the best

part. As a Pomp podcast listener, you can earn up to $1,000 in rewards. All you have to do is add funds to your account. Search for Bitcoin IRA in the App Store or visit BitcoinIRA.com slash Pomp, and you can join 200,000 Americans on their journey to upgrade their retirement. That's BitcoinIRA.com slash Pomp to upgrade your retirement today. So if we kind of think about where exactly are we in this entire situation, we've got a Bitcoin price that has dropped from $126,000 down to about $75,000, 40% decline. We know that Bitcoin historically has traded in the exact way it's trading now in bear markets, where you kind of get a decline, then you get some bit of a relief rally, you hit some sort

of technical resistance or some sort of issue in market structure, and then you get a lower high over and over again. One of the ways that this has been described to me in the past that always is resonated. My friend Mark Yusko explains it as it's kind of like a ball bouncing down a set of stairs. Every time the ball hits a stair, yeah, sure, it kind of comes up, but it's still going down over time. And so that, you know, kind of bouncing ball down a set of stairs is exactly what you see in the price, $126,000 top. Then we went to 108. We kind of relief rallied, maybe it was like 112. Then we went down to about 105, relief rallied to 108. And we went down, you know, sub 100K. That was just a couple of weeks ago, the first time that we broke back below 100K.

People kind of forget just in what short period of time we've gone from 126 to 75K. And so that bouncy ball down a set of stairs is usually the exact type of trading that you would see in a bear market. Then we've got this whole deflation conversation and markets being forward-looking. I think what's really frustrating to a lot of people is that gold has been going up a lot while Bitcoin has been going down. So if you have a lack of inflation, why is gold going up? And again, as I've explained in the past, I believe that gold is going up because central banks are buying gold, but they're not buying it because they think that inflation is coming. They're buying it as a much more macro decision to get away from fiat currencies. And the way that you

see this is historically, if a central bank went and they said, OK, you know what? I don't think that the dollar is going to do well. I think the dollar is going to get devalued. I think there's going to be high inflation. I may just think that there is some sort of socioeconomic or geopolitical issues in the United States, and I want to lessen my dependency on U.S. dollars. Historically, they would sell dollars and maybe they would buy yen or yuan or euros or pesos or something else. That would be moving from one fiat currency to another, but that's not what they're doing. Instead, what we're seeing is we're seeing people sell dollars or treasuries and buy gold. And so it's actually part of a de-fiat process rather than a de-dollarization. I think that distinction

is very important because what it shows is the reason why people are buying gold is part of this de-fiat process. It's not about inflation. It's not about a single fiat currency. It's actually about the fact that certain central banks are saying, look, we want to significantly increase our gold reserves and therefore gold is going up even if we are not necessarily worried about the inflation. Now, Bitcoin historically has not been an asset that is bought by central banks. And so the quote unquote net new buyer to the store of value category are these central banks. Now, it's not that they're new buyers, it's just that the capital they're putting in is quote unquote net new to the inflation hedge or the store of value asset class. And so Bitcoin does

not yet be accepted by these central banks as an asset that is part of a defiat process. Instead, they look at Bitcoin as something that could potentially hedge against inflation or may even be still in the speculative bucket. When they go to lessen their dependency on all fiat currencies, Bitcoin is not part of that conversation yet. I do believe in the future it will be, but the asset is not large enough. It is not mature enough. It does not have a long enough operating history and it has not resonated with the central bankers in that way. I actually would argue that central bankers look at gold as an asset. It looks at it as something that could be an ally to them. I think that a lot of central bankers still look at Bitcoin as

a negative, as something that is competing with them. And so that's a good reason or a good explanation, in my opinion, as to why gold is going up, but Bitcoin is going down, yet we are not expecting inflation. And so Bitcoin didn't break as an inflation hedge. I actually think that it's just gold is being bought for a different reason. Now, when you expand out across the metals, you see silver, copper, platinum, etc. Then you start getting into a lot of the industrial use cases, etc. And also, you know, kind of supply constraints with things like platinum that are really driving the metal prices. And so in conclusion, I think that Bitcoin probably isn't a bear market. My expectation is that Bitcoin is not going to just do a U-turn and

all of a sudden go back to $126,000. I think we've got some time here where Bitcoin is going to go kind of flat to down. But if you've been around for a while, you know this. When Bitcoin goes down, the hardcore Bitcoiners get excited. They try to buy more Bitcoin. They try to figure out how do I continue to accumulate Bitcoin? And a big thing if you're new to Bitcoin that you need to think about is, am I measuring my portfolio in Bitcoin or in dollars? Different people do different things. And some people, you know, I would even argue me, certain assets I denominate in Bitcoin, like Bitcoin. And so I just constantly think about how many Bitcoin do I own? And should I be buying more? And can I increase the number of Bitcoin that I own? On the other hand, there

are my stock portfolio as an example. I don't denominate that in Bitcoin. I actually look at it in dollars. Now, I'm aware of what is the stock performance compared to Bitcoin's performance. And so there's a little bit of comparison there. And, you know, you can even argue denomination. But really, when I'm looking at my portfolio, I'm looking at it in terms of dollars. And so even in my own portfolio, somebody who is very bullish on Bitcoin long term, there are certain assets that I think about in terms of Bitcoin. There's certain assets that I think in terms of dollars. And then from time to time, I will look at, OK, well, regardless how many Bitcoin I own, what's the dollar value? It's going up or it's going down.

And then regardless of what my stock portfolio is valued in dollars, how many Bitcoin is that equivalent to, right? And how is that tracking over time? And so what you need to decide is, are you trying to measure the dollar value of your Bitcoin? Or are you trying to measure the Bitcoin number? And most people have done very well if they simply said, my goal is to try to save in Bitcoin and try to accumulate more and more Bitcoin over time. Everyone starts off with zero. Some people can go and buy a lot of Bitcoin because they got money from somewhere else. Some people are just starting. They may be a young person

or they may just start dipping their toe into investing. Then you gotta go and say, okay, well, maybe I gotta buy 0.001 Bitcoin to start and then a little bit more and a little bit more and you just start stacking sats over time. So regardless of what your approach is, I do think that we are going to continue to see Bitcoin kind of flattish to slightly down.

I don't think that we will get 80% drawdowns. I reserve the right to be wrong, obviously. And if I'm wrong, I'll come in and I'll just tell you guys, I was wrong about that. It was a much deeper drawdown than I thought. But I do think that being down 40% is in line with a lot of things that we're talking about here. It wouldn't surprise me if we went a little bit lower, but it is hard to see us going down to, you know, call it 30k, 40k Bitcoin price, unless there was an exogenous shock. There was some sort of, you know, contagion. There was some sort of forced selling in the market because of some sort of issue. Like those

reasons then you get kind of capitulation type wicks uh and you can go down very fast and very severely but i just don't see in the market where that could be um if you know uh or you've got thoughts you know please share in the comments i'd love to hear uh what you guys are thinking do you think we're in a bear market or not how deep do you think that we can go um and how are you thinking about bitcoin in your portfolio moving forward uh i learned just as much from you guys as you learned from me um so sharing any of those thoughts would be really valuable and the last thing i'll say is if any of you are trying to think through your portfolio uh one of One of the things I'm spending a lot of time on right now is a product that we built called Sylvia.

You basically come in completely for free. You can attach your bank accounts, your crypto accounts. You can attach your brokerage account, your credit cards. You can upload your real estate, your car, et cetera. And then by giving context to an LLM, you can start asking Sylvia all kinds of questions. And with Bitcoin and bear markets, you can say, hey, is Bitcoin going to be in a bear market? And how would that impact my portfolio? You can ask things about the economy.

How will my portfolio perform during the next recession? You can ask things like if they run the economy hot or if we get deflation, how will my portfolio perform? You can also do really, really specific things like go do deep research on Bitcoin and give me the bull in the bear case and then help me understand what should my allocation percentage be. All of these things are really, really helpful when trying to construct a portfolio or think through the current portfolio you have.

You can also ask it to analyze the risks of your portfolio or even do something like a Monte Carlo simulation, do 100,000 simulations and predict where you'll financially be in 10 years. And those things are really valuable to me. And so we built this product because I was using it internally. I wanted everyone else to be able to use it completely free. You can go to CFO, Sylvia, S-I-L-V-I-A.com. Go check it out.

And Bitcoin, is it in a bear market? Is it not? You guys tell me. But so far, I think the price action, I think where we are, it's likely in a bear market. and that's okay. Bitcoiners understand that that means that you could buy the same asset that you could buy for $126,000 a couple of months ago. You now can buy it for $75,000. And if this was a consumer product, if it was nice shoes, a watch or a phone, people would be yelling and screaming, wow, look at the sale. So you just got to ask yourself,

do you understand Bitcoin? Do you believe in it? And do you think when the price goes down, it gives you the opportunity to buy more? Or are you scared? And does it really bother you? And you don't want to hold Bitcoin when it's going down. It's up for all of you to decide. There's my thoughts. Hope it's valuable. Talk to you guys next time.