Bitcoin sits around $65,000, roughly half of its October peak. Ethereum is down about 60%. By the standards of previous crypto winters, this is a remarkably gentle bear market, and that mildness is the most interesting thing about it. Something structural has changed. Whether it changes what happens next is the question worth asking.
I bought my first crypto at eighteen. Not much, and not cleverly. What pulled me in wasn’t the technology, if I’m honest. It was that the market never closed, that I was able to open an account without anyone’s permission, and that nobody asked whether I had a portfolio or a pension or a clue.
Since then I’ve sat through a proper run higher and a grinding decline. The latter is the one that makes you question what you thought you once knew.
So: why are prices down, when does this turn, and is any of it actually the future? I’ll give you my answers, though I’d hold them loosely if I were you.
Where We Actually Are
Bitcoin peaked at $125,198 in October 2025. By June this year it had fallen to a 21-month low near $59,300, and it’s spent August drifting between roughly $63,000 and $65,400. Ethereum topped out at $4,953 in August 2025 and now trades around $1,900.
Down about half for Bitcoin. Down closer to 60% for Ether.
Now here’s the part that surprised me. Previous Bitcoin bear markets have routinely erased 75 to 80% from the high. On that measure this decline is unusually shallow. Veterans have been calling it a nothingburger, which is either reassuring or exactly what people say before the floor gives way.
Quick definitions, since the terms get used sloppily. A bear market is a sustained decline of 20% or more with negative sentiment attached. A bull run is the opposite: rising prices, expanding participation, rising confidence. Neither has a formal start date. You mostly recognise them in the rear-view mirror.
One metric worth knowing is realised price, which is roughly the average price at which all coins on the network last moved. Think of it as the market’s aggregate cost basis. Bitcoin near $64,600 sits above its realised price of about $52,900. Ether at roughly $1,858 sits below its realised price near $2,450, meaning the average holder is underwater. In previous cycles, the final capitulations came as a market price converged towards realised price. CryptoQuant’s read is that this is a late-stage bear market rather than a confirmed bottom, and their head of research was explicit that prices can still fall further.
The macro backdrop explains most of the weakness. Rates have stayed higher for longer than anyone wanted. Liquidity is tight. Crypto is a risk asset, and risk assets generally get sold when money costs more. Add the Iran flare-up, stalled US legislation and a few security incidents, and you have a market with no shortage of reasons to stay cautious.
So When Does It Turn?
The straight answer is that nobody knows, and anyone giving you a date is selling something. But the signals are readable.
The traditional model says that crypto moves in four-year cycles anchored to the Bitcoin halving, the programmed event roughly every four years that cuts the reward paid to miners in half, tightening new supply. Historically, it has preceded major rallies. I’m increasingly sceptical that this still holds as cleanly as it did.
Why? Because the buyer base has changed. When the marginal buyer was a retail investor on their phone, supply mechanics dominated. When the marginal buyer is an institution allocating through a regulated fund, flows and regulation matter more than the halving calendar. Deeper liquidity and proper hedging tools tend to dampen the boom-and-bust pattern. The cycle may not be dead, but it’s definitely getting blurrier.
What I’m actually watching: ETF flows, because they’re the cleanest measure of institutional conviction. The Federal Reserve, because rate cuts release liquidity into risk assets. Regulatory milestones, particularly the CLARITY Act’s progress through the Senate. And whether large holders keep accumulating, which so far they are: Ethereum wallets holding 10,000 to 100,000 ETH have grown from around 14 million ETH in mid-2025 to a record 19.6 million, while smaller holders sell. Ownership is concentrating.
Let’s be clear here: three scenarios, clearly labelled as scenarios rather than forecasts, because I have no special insight and neither does anyone quoting a number at you.
Bear case: rates stay sensitive, regulation stalls, and Bitcoin tests $50,000 with Ether towards $1,500. Base case, and where I’d put the most weight: we grind sideways through the rest of 2026, with Bitcoin holding the low $60,000s and a genuine recovery somewhere in the $80,000 to $95,000 range by late 2027. Bull case: rate cuts land, the CLARITY Act passes, ETF flows accelerate and Bitcoin revisits and exceeds its high, with $130,000 to $150,000 plausible on a two-year view.
I lean toward the base case. The mildness of this drawdown suggests a floor built by structural buyers rather than sentiment, and structural buyers don’t produce explosive rallies. They produce slower, duller ones.
The ETF Question, Which Is Really Everything
In January 2024 the SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs. An exchange-traded fund is simply a fund that trades like a share; a spot crypto ETF holds the actual asset rather than derivatives. Boring plumbing. Enormous consequences.
Before ETFs, an institution wanting Bitcoin exposure had to solve custody, accounting and compliance problems that most compliance departments would rather not go near. After the approval, they could simply buy a ticker. Cumulative inflows reached $58.72 billion by mid-2026, with roughly $22 billion of net inflows in 2025 alone. Institutional holders have nearly tripled their share of Bitcoin’s long-term supply since approval.
The flows are volatile, which tells you something. April 2026 saw $2.44 billion of inflows; May brought $1.26 billion of outflows across six sessions. That’s tactical positioning, not permanent allocation. But even fickle institutional money behaves differently from retail: it sizes positions, it rebalances, it doesn’t panic-sell at 3am.
Which brings the real question into focus. Could the next bull market be driven more by institutions rather than by retail investors? I think it already is, and I believe that’s why this bear market has been so shallow. The shape of the next rally will reflect that. A new pattern is set to be drawn. Less vertical, less euphoric, more grinding. Less fun, frankly. Probably healthier
There’s a second shift underneath. Institutional attention is drifting past Bitcoin ETFs towards tokenised securities, stablecoins and staking infrastructure. A passive ETF gives you exposure to a volatile asset. The infrastructure gives you a business.
The Sustainability Argument Everyone Gets Wrong
This is where I want to be careful, because both sides of this debate are lazy.
Bitcoin’s energy consumption is genuinely large. Digiconomist puts it around 204 TWh a year, comparable to Thailand’s entire national consumption, though Cambridge’s estimates have run lower, in the 121 to 167 TWh range depending on assumptions. The reason is proof-of-work: miners compete to solve computational puzzles, and that competition consumes electricity by design. It’s not a bug. It’s the security model.
Ethereum used to work the same way, consuming perhaps 78 TWh annually. In 2022 it switched up to proof-of-stake, where validators are chosen by how much they’ve locked up rather than how much computing power they can throw at a problem. Consumption fell to roughly 0.0026 TWh a year, around 870 tonnes of CO2 equivalent. That’s a reduction of more than 99.9%, verified by the Crypto Carbon Ratings Institute.
So here’s the argument I’d make: ‘crypto’ is not sustainable or unsustainable. That framing is useless. Bitcoin and Ethereum now differ by roughly five orders of magnitude in energy use while both being called cryptocurrencies. The question is always which asset, which consensus mechanism, which use case.
Policy is also now beginning to catch up. Europe’s MiCA regulation requires crypto issuers and service providers to disclose energy consumption and carbon footprint. That’s the right instrument, because it doesn’t ban anything. It just makes the difference visible and lets capital decide.
And there’s a genuinely interesting flip side. Blockchain infrastructure could become useful to climate finance rather than merely costly to it. Tokenised carbon credits, where a credit becomes a traceable digital asset, address the double-counting and verification failures that have plagued voluntary carbon markets for years. Estimates put that the market is growing from around $414.8 billion in 2023 towards $1.6 trillion by 2028. Tokenised green bonds could do something similar for transparency, letting an investor trace proceeds to a specific project rather than a trusting label.
I’d hold that optimism lightly. Tokenising a bad carbon credit gives you a bad carbon credit with better paperwork. The technology solves verification, not integrity. But verification is where a lot of the current failure sits, so it’s not nothing.
Is Crypto Actually the Future?
Only if you stop treating it as one thing. Break it apart and the picture gets clearer.
Bitcoin is a store-of-value asset. Digital gold, roughly, with a fixed supply and a security model that costs a lot of electricity to maintain. It isn’t going to be a payment network at scale, and I don’t think it is trying to be anymore.
Ethereum is financial infrastructure: programmable settlement, on which other things get built. Stablecoins, which are tokens pegged to a currency like the dollar, are the payments layer, and they’ve quietly become the most useful thing crypto has produced. Supply has held around $270 billion, and under the GENIUS Act banks can now issue and custody regulated stablecoins in the US, creating a compliant settlement rail that runs around the clock. Hong Kong approved its stablecoin regime in May, effective this month. Canada published draft rules last November.
Then tokenisation, which is the one I’d bet on longest-term: representing real assets, bonds, funds, property, as digital tokens that settle instantly. And DeFi, decentralised finance, which offers lending and trading without intermediaries, and remains genuinely experimental in the way the others no longer are.
Does that replace traditional finance? No. I don’t think that was ever a serious proposition, and the people who insisted on it did the sector real damage. What I believe happens is duller and more consequential: the useful parts get absorbed. Stablecoins become settlement infrastructure inside regulated banks. Tokenisation becomes how funds and bonds are issued. The revolution ends up as plumbing, which is what most revolutions in finance end up as.
The East London Angle
There is a reason this matters locally. East London runs a genuine fintech corridor, from the Shoreditch and Old Street startup cluster through to Canary Wharf, where Level39 has incubated financial technology companies for over a decade, and out to the Royal Docks. The regulatory expertise, the venture capital and the engineering talent are all within a few stops of each other.
There’s also a younger, more diverse population than most of the capital, and crypto adoption skews young. That cuts both ways, and I want to be honest about it rather than romantic.
The positive case is real: for someone who can’t get a decent savings product, who sends money to family abroad and gets mauled by remittance fees, or who simply can’t access mainstream investment products, crypto rails offer something the existing system hasn’t provided. Stablecoin remittances genuinely undercut traditional corridors on cost and speed.
The negative case is equally real. Democratising access to a volatile asset is also democratising access to loss. I’ve watched people my age put money they couldn’t afford to lose into things that they didn’t understand, in a market with no closing bell and no circuit breaker. Financial inclusion and financial risk arrive hand in hand. Anyone selling the first without mentioning the second is taking you for a ride.
What would actually help is the boring answer: financial education alongside access. If the next generation of finance in this city is going to be shaped by fintech, tokenisation and climate finance, and I think it will be, then the people building it should probably come from the boroughs it’s being built in.
My Verdict
Is crypto dead? No. But plenty of individual projects are, and this cycle will kill more. No doubt about it. The gap between assets with genuine use and assets with good marketing is widening, and that’s overdue.
When’s the next bull run? My base case is a grind through the rest of 2026 with recovery building into 2027, contingent on the Fed easing and the CLARITY Act landing. The signals I’ll watch: sustained ETF inflows over consecutive months rather than tactical bursts, Ether reclaiming its realised price around $2,450, and large-holder accumulation continuing.
Is crypto the future? Partly, and not in the way its loudest advocates promised. Bitcoin as an asset, stablecoins as payment rails, tokenisation as market infrastructure. Absorbed into finance rather than replacing it.
I started buying at eighteen because it felt like a market that would let me in. I still think that is the genuine innovation, and the genuine risk. Both. At once.
Learn the difference between the assets before you buy any of them. That’s the whole lesson, and it took me a bear market to learn it.
