Over the past weekend, the crypto market did not see a sentiment recovery. After several days of narrow-range fluctuations, Bitcoin came under significant pressure from Sunday evening to Monday U.S. stock market hours, falling below the $90,000 mark, with the intraday low once touching around $86,000. ETH dropped 3.4% to $2,980; BNB fell 2.1%; XRP declined 4%; SOL decreased 1.5%, retreating to around $126. Among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market cap, only TRX recorded a slight increase of less than 1%, while the rest were in a correction phase.
From a time perspective, this is not an isolated adjustment. Since hitting a new all-time high in mid-October, Bitcoin has accumulated a pullback of over 30%, with each rebound appearing brief and hesitant. Although ETF funds have not seen systematic outflows, marginal inflows have significantly slowed, making it difficult to provide the "sentiment foundation" for the market as before. The crypto market is transitioning from one-sided optimism to a more complex and patience-testing phase.
Against this backdrop, Mike McGlone, Senior Commodity Strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, released a latest report, placing Bitcoin's current trend within a broader macro and cyclical framework and presenting a highly unsettling judgment: Bitcoin is very likely to fall back to $10,000 by 2026. This is not alarmist but a potential outcome under a deflationary cycle.
The reason this view has sparked significant controversy is not just because the number itself is "too low," but because McGlone does not treat Bitcoin as an independent crypto asset. Instead, he reexamines it within the long-term coordinate system of "global risk assets—liquidity—wealth regression."
What Comes After Inflation? McGlone Focuses Not on Crypto but on the Cycle Inflection Point
To understand McGlone's judgment, the key is not how he views the crypto industry but how he interprets the next phase of the macro environment.
In his latest views, McGlone repeatedly emphasizes a concept: Inflation/Deflation Inflection. In his view, global markets are near such a critical juncture. As inflation peaks in major economies and growth momentum slows, asset pricing logic is shifting from "fighting inflation" to "coping with deflationary pressures."
He points out that by around 2026, commodity prices may fluctuate around a key axis—the "inflation-deflation dividing line" for core commodities like natural gas, corn, and copper could settle near $5. Among these, only copper, which has real industrial demand support, might still stand above this axis by the end of 2025.
McGlone notes: When liquidity recedes, the market will重新区分 "real demand" and "financialization premium." In his framework, Bitcoin is not "digital gold" but an asset highly correlated with risk appetite and speculative cycles. When the inflation narrative recedes and macro liquidity tightens, Bitcoin tends to reflect this change earlier and more sharply.
In McGlone's view, his logic is not based on a single technical level but the叠加 of three long-term paths.
First, mean reversion after extreme wealth creation. McGlone has long emphasized that Bitcoin is one of the most extreme wealth amplifiers of the past decade-plus of loose global monetary conditions. When asset price growth long outstrips real economy and cash flow growth, the regression is not gentle but violent. Historically, whether it was the 1929 U.S. stock market or the 2000 tech bubble, the commonality of the top phase was: the market repeatedly sought a "new paradigm" at highs, and the eventual adjustment幅度, in hindsight, often far exceeded the most pessimistic expectations at the time.
Second, the relative pricing relationship between Bitcoin and gold. McGlone特别强调 the Bitcoin/Gold ratio. This ratio was about 10x at the end of 2022, then expanded rapidly driven by the bull market, reaching over 30x at one point in 2025. But this year, the ratio has fallen about 40%, dropping to around 21x. In his view, if deflationary pressures persist and gold remains firm due to safe-haven demand, it is not an激进假设 for the ratio to further return to historical ranges.
Third, systemic issues in the supply environment of speculative assets. Although Bitcoin itself has a clear total supply cap, McGlone has多次指出 that what the market is truly trading is not Bitcoin's "uniqueness" but the risk premium of the entire crypto ecosystem. When millions of tokens, projects, and narratives compete for the same risk budget, in a deflationary cycle, the entire sector tends to be uniformly discounted, and Bitcoin can hardly完全脱离 this revaluation process.
It should be noted that Mike McGlone is not a bull/bear spokesperson for the crypto market. As a senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg, he has long studied the cyclical relationships between crude oil, precious metals, agricultural products, interest rates, and risk assets. His predictions are not always precisely timed, but their value lies in: he often raises structural contrarian questions when market sentiment is most consensus-driven.
In his latest remarks, he also主动复盘 his "errors," including underestimating the timing of gold breaking through $2,000 and misjudging the节奏 of U.S. Treasury yields and U.S. stocks. But in his view, these deviations反复印证 one point: the market is most prone to illusions about trends before cycle inflection points.
Other Voices: Divergence Is Widening
Of course, McGlone's judgment is not market consensus. In fact, mainstream institutions' attitudes show clear分化.
Traditional financial institutions like Standard Chartered have recently significantly lowered their medium-to-long-term target prices for Bitcoin, reducing the 2025 expectation from $200,000 to about $100,000 and adjusting the 2026 imagination from $300,000 to around $150,000. In other words, institutions no longer assume that ETFs and corporate allocations will provide marginal buying at any price range持续.
Glassnode's research points out that Bitcoin's current consolidation range between $80,000 and $90,000 has put pressure on the market, with intensity comparable to the end of January 2022. The current market's relative unrealized losses have approached 10% of market cap. Analysts further explain that such market dynamics reflect a state of "liquidity-constrained, sensitive to macro shocks" but not yet reaching the level of a typical bear market彻底抛售 (panic selling).
From a broader time dimension, the current uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin is no longer just an issue of the crypto market itself but is firmly embedded in the global macro cycle. The coming week is seen by many strategists as the most critical macro window of the year-end—the European Central Bank, Bank of England, and Bank of Japan will相继 announce interest rate decisions, while the U.S. will迎来 a series of delayed employment and inflation data, providing a belated "reality check" for the market.
The Fed's signal at the December 10 FOMC meeting was unusual: not only did it cut rates by 25 basis points, but there were also three dissenting votes, and Powell直言 that job growth in previous months might have been overestimated. This week's密集出炉 macro data will reshape the market's core expectations for 2026—whether the Fed can continue to cut rates or will have to press pause for a longer period. For risk assets, this answer may be more important than any single asset's bull-bear debate.
Author: Seed.eth
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