Hello everyone, Happy New Year!
The impossible year 2025 is finally over, but the future right now looks even more bleak than many anticipated.
People expected Bitcoin to rally to extreme all-time highs, driven by institutional demand.
It didn't happen.
Instead, Bitcoin now sits roughly 25–30% below its ATH, while most of the crypto market has suffered even heavier losses, with only a few exceptions such as ZEC, BCH, Monero, and a handful of others surviving the massacre.
Top crypto influencers confidently claimed extreme prices once again throughout the year (like XRP at $100), alongside countless other price predictions that have since been completely invalidated.
Regarding BTC this time it was banks, BlackRock, and large institutions that aggressively promoted Bitcoin, ultimately profiting by taking their middleman share. They claimed BTC would reach $200,000, $250,000, even $500,000 in 2025, while largely ignoring the market cycles and reality itself.
As 2025 is now closed, the crypto market lost more than a trillion dollars in total market cap, confidence was shaken, and skepticism toward 2026 is stronger than ever.
So what does 2026 have in store?
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What Does 2026 Have In Store?
As we enter 2026, we witness military interventions take place, wars not stopping, more wars starting, conflicts and military build ups. The entire world is unstable, and we all have to thank a few madmen in power for this and corrupted mindsets right below them.
Within this global environment, crypto is not really what matters.
Still everything that happens will have vast negative consequences to assets, and that also includes the speculative cryptocurrency sector.
Under a realistic prism, Bitcoin is not part of finance, but part of a small niche that does not really matter to the greater picture.
Actually, it is not widely recognized as anything else but a gamble, an exposure to high volatility as they call it.
Exactly what the Michigan state pension system loves, and manages to crash pensions to the ground every time.
(This is from the Big Short, you've probably watched it. Still, this is the best time to watch it again.)
On April, 2023, with BTC standing at ~$30,000 I predicted how and why it would reach $100K. Here's the story where I analyzed the charts and identified the pattern that would get the price there.
The price surpassed my prediction up to $125,000, although I had already identified this outlier and corrected to that exact number as an ultimate top ($120,000) in the following months. When the bear begins is something difficult to predict way earlier than it does. So I gave some very rough estimates which missed the target of Q2 2025, however later revised and realized the overheated levels.
And with BTC at $125,000 this October, I've warned again:
(link: YouTube)
Price is simply following every other cycle, although the price moves with less volatility, still, the same elasticity to the downside. So, I consider it almost impossible the bear market will fail to validate.
Probably the drop below $75,000 (the 2025 bottom) will be the decisive factor.
But first, we may witness the usual "altcoin season", with a flood of useless memecoins rising for a few days or weeks, and then, suddenly, the crash.
After that, we enter the second year of the bear market.
I’ve said many times that the best time to buy is always when there’s blood in the streets.
When exchanges and companies collapse (Mt. Gox, FTX, BlockFi, etc.), when miners shut down their machines, and when people tell you crypto is dead and call you a fool , that’s the moment. And we are certainly not there now, not while politicians are discussing "crypto reserves". Personally, I will buy again when everything becomes quiet.
However, this is not financial advice for you, just personal thoughts, so don't blame anyone on the internet for your own unstable financial decisions but do your own research.
The crypto market doesn’t need a dramatic event to enter a bear market. In January 2018, nothing broke. In 2017 Bitcoin transaction fees reached $70 and then people realized it failed to scale. So they simply exited the market instead of looking into (far better) alternatives.
Still, a major event would accelerate the collapse of prices. And that’s actually healthy.
Without a proper cleanup, bad actors remain and grow stronger. Scams are not flushed out, and continue operating longer than they should.
That’s also why bear markets are healthy: New ideas emerge, developers focus on building applications, hype fades, and people become more rational. And we do need reason more than anything else. Most great ideas are created when the market sits quite at the bottom.
The time to build is then, not during hype cycles. Therefore, if a bear market does not materialize, that should actually worry everyone in this industry.
Conclusion
This was my case for 2026 and the crypto market in general. Doom and gloom.
I’ve been in crypto for nine years now, and it’s not that exciting anymore. The opportunities are less and less each time.
The big guns always ruin the fun: corporations, financial behemoths chasing their 2% cut from investors, politicians, and various paid shills and bad actors. All of this hypocrisy surfaces when prices shoot up, only for the same rats to abandon ship when the market falls into the abyss of irrelevance.
This is how it works and it will not change.
Some people understand that cryptocurrency still has a chance to succeed, but only if its original ideas are not erased and entirely replaced with politically correct narratives like KYC, custodians, centralization, permission.
Disruption has always been what drove interest in crypto, and prices followed the excitement of discovering a financial system that was different and far better than the existing one.
2026 will not be a good year in terms of price, but it will be a great year for the communities that focus on real progress: those building and developing permissionless financial applications for the real economy, as well as the parallel digital economy that may ultimately grow far larger in the future.
I plan to post new stories more often this year, probably publishing them here first, on Publish0x.
LinkTree (updated): @panterabch
On YouTube: @panteraCrypto
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