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Research • October 22, 2026 • 20 mins

Why Now Is the Time to Add and Hold BTC

We believe the bottom is in. Selling pressure has diminished, the debasement case has strengthened, and the crowd has left.

This research alert was originally sent directly to clients of Galaxy Trading and Galaxy Asset Management on Oct. 22, 2026. Trade or invest with Galaxy to receive the most timely research directly in your inbox.


Summary

Bitcoin traded at $81,391 yesterday (Thursday, Oct. 22), 3% below Wednesday’s close of $84,176. At Thursday’s price, bitcoin is off 35% from its October 2025 high and 39% above the June 30, 2026, low. We think the bear market ended in June and that bitcoin is in the accumulation phase that has preceded every prior advance.

On a technical basis, the 200-week moving average held, the 50-week moving average has been regained for five straight weeks, and at day 916 of the halving cycle, bitcoin is past the window in which every prior cycle bottomed.

Positioning says the sellers are mostly gone: the basis traders and macro tourists who were long into October 2025 have cut their ETF and futures exposure by more than half, while everyone else has mostly held. Equities sit near records, while BTC needs a 53% rise just to retake its own all-time high.

The fundamental case has only strengthened: the likelihood of medium-term debasement by a sovereign running $2 trillion deficits at 5% yields. A bet against stocks and hard assets is a bet on fiat, the one position that makes no sense today. And sentiment has swung to “blockchain, not bitcoin” for the third time (the first two times marked lows).

Our conclusion is simple: we believe now is an attractive time tobuy and hold bitcoin.

Late last month I attended Korea Blockchain, a fantastic conference that showcased South Korea’s large and growing interest in digital assets. Despite the broad-based enthusiasm, the nexus of the event was squarely on one thesis: the great convergence of digital assets and traditional capital markets.

The conference featured dozens of panel discussions on tokenization, real-world assets, stablecoins, and upgrading payments infrastructure. I spoke on one of the few panels that focused on bitcoin and crypto asset markets. It reminded me of Consensus 2018 in New York, which was littered with men in suits from the Big Three consultancies talking about “enterprise blockchains” like R3’s Corda and IBM’s Hyperledger. After the 2017 blow-off top and resulting decline in bitcoin’s price, the pendulum then had swung dramatically away from bitcoin and crypto toward the less threatening and more “mature” concept of “blockchain technology.” In 2015 and 2016 (another deep bear market trough), from my vantage point at Fidelity Investments, a similar sentiment was visible: no one wanted to talk about bitcoin, but the bankers were all gassed up about “blockchain.” The backlash from the Silk Road (“bitcoin is for criminals”) and the ICO boom (“crypto is a scam”) combined with the underlying technology’s clear benefit to push institutions away from bearer assets, censorship resistance, and permissionless finance, and into more “respectable” endeavors. Bitcoin and crypto were definitively not dead, but like today, attention had swung dramatically away from the ethos of decentralization and coalesced around a less revolutionary concept: let’s upgrade the financial system’s technology.

While efforts in 2016 and 2018-2019 to embrace blockchains on Wall Street didn’t amount to much, this time will likely be different. The institutional embrace of digital assets and blockchain technology is undeniable now, and likely to result in a more efficient financial system. Even so, the case for non-sovereign, censorship-resistant, hard money should not be forgotten because it will not go away.Bitcoin traded at $81,391 yesterday (Thursday, Oct. 22), 3% below Wednesday’s close of $84,176. At Thursday’s price, bitcoin is off 35% from its October 2025 high and 39% above the June 30, 2026, low. We think the bear market ended in June and that bitcoin is in the accumulation phase that has preceded every prior advance.

On a technical basis, the 200-week moving average held, the 50-week moving average has been regained for five straight weeks, and at day 916 of the halving cycle, bitcoin is past the window in which every prior cycle bottomed.

Positioning says the sellers are mostly gone: the basis traders and macro tourists who were long into October 2025 have cut their ETF and futures exposure by more than half, while everyone else has mostly held. Equities sit near records, while BTC needs a 53% rise just to retake its own all-time high.

The fundamental case has only strengthened: the likelihood of medium-term debasement by a sovereign running $2 trillion deficits at 5% yields. A bet against stocks and hard assets is a bet on fiat, the one position that makes no sense today. And sentiment has swung to “blockchain, not bitcoin” for the third time (the first two times marked lows).

Our conclusion is simple: we believe now is an attractive time tobuy and hold bitcoin.

Late last month I attended Korea Blockchain, a fantastic conference that showcased South Korea’s large and growing interest in digital assets. Despite the broad-based enthusiasm, the nexus of the event was squarely on one thesis: the great convergence of digital assets and traditional capital markets.

The conference featured dozens of panel discussions on tokenization, real-world assets, stablecoins, and upgrading payments infrastructure. I spoke on one of the few panels that focused on bitcoin and crypto asset markets. It reminded me of Consensus 2018 in New York, which was littered with men in suits from the Big Three consultancies talking about “enterprise blockchains” like R3’s Corda and IBM’s Hyperledger. After the 2017 blow-off top and resulting decline in bitcoin’s price, the pendulum then had swung dramatically away from bitcoin and crypto toward the less threatening and more “mature” concept of “blockchain technology.” In 2015 and 2016 (another deep bear market trough), from my vantage point at Fidelity Investments, a similar sentiment was visible: no one wanted to talk about bitcoin, but the bankers were all gassed up about “blockchain.” The backlash from the Silk Road (“bitcoin is for criminals”) and the ICO boom (“crypto is a scam”) combined with the underlying technology’s clear benefit to push institutions away from bearer assets, censorship resistance, and permissionless finance, and into more “respectable” endeavors. Bitcoin and crypto were definitively not dead, but like today, attention had swung dramatically away from the ethos of decentralization and coalesced around a less revolutionary concept: let’s upgrade the financial system’s technology.

While efforts in 2016 and 2018-2019 to embrace blockchains on Wall Street didn’t amount to much, this time will likely be different. The institutional embrace of digital assets and blockchain technology is undeniable now, and likely to result in a more efficient financial system. Even so, the case for non-sovereign, censorship-resistant, hard money should not be forgotten because it will not go away.

1. Technical: we believe the bottom is in and accumulation is under way

Bitcoin's bear markets have one reliable map: the 200-week moving average is the floor and the 50-week average the ceiling.

The price lost the 50-week average in the week ended Nov. 16, 2025, and spent 44 weeks below it. The June low tested the floor and held: the worst weekly close came in 4.7% below the 200-week average (against 1.4% in 2015, 2.8% in 2018 and 32% in 2022). In the week ended Sept. 20, 2026, the price closed back above the 50-week average, and the week ended Oct. 18 was the fifth straight close above it. In every completed bear market since 2011, the first sustained run back above the ceiling came after the low (Chart 1). Thursday’s spot price of $81,391 sat 6% above the average: the decline since Wednesday’s close did not threaten the reclaim.

Exhibit 01 price 50w 200w

Chart 1. Weekly closes against the 50- and 200-week moving averages since 2016. Bitcoin lost the 50-week average in the week ended Nov. 16, 2025, tested the 200-week floor in June (-4.7% on the worst weekly close), and regained the 50-week average in the week ended Sept. 20; the week ended Oct. 18 was the fifth consecutive weekly close above it. The open marker is the spot price at 19:51 UTC on Oct. 22, +6.3% from the 50-week average.

How often has a reclaim been followed by a new leg down? Of the 13 completed reclaims since 2011, the split is how long the price had been below the average. The four that ended spells of 20 weeks or more 1) never closed more than 8.4% below the reclaim level in the following year; 2) were +1497%, +128%, +55%, +142% higher a year later; and 3) regained the prior all-time high within 33–83 weeks. Of the nine that ended spells of 14 weeks or less, seven fell more than 25% within a year. September's reclaim ended a 44-week spell (Chart 2). This is a pattern.

Exhibit 02 reclaim paths

Chart 2. Every reclaim of the 50-week average since 2011, indexed to the reclaim close and followed for a year. The four reclaims that ended spells of 20 weeks or more never closed more than 8.4% below the reclaim level; of the nine that ended shorter spells, seven fell more than 25% within a year. September's reclaim ended a 44-week spell.

The four-year cycle agrees. The three completed cycles printed their lows on days 777, 889 and 912 after their halvings; this cycle's low so far came on day 802, and yesterday was day 916. From this day count, the prior cycles rose 87x, 19x and 7.6x to their next peaks (multiples that shrink every cycle and that we do not forecast). The direction has not failed (Chart 3).

Exhibit 03 halving cycles

Chart 3. Each halving cycle indexed to its halving-day close. The three completed cycles bottomed on days 777, 889 and 912; yesterday was day 916, and this cycle's lowest close so far came on day 802. The open marker is yesterday’s spot price.

This was the shallowest bear on record (-53% against -93%, -85%, -84%, -77% before it) and the first in which price never traded below the network’s cost basis: the ratio of market value to realized value bottomed at 1.10, against 0.56, 0.69 and 0.75 at the three prior lows. The coins that carried the recovery from $58,525 have an average cost of $74,811; price first closed back above that cost basis on Aug. 19 (Chart 4), when it stood at $69,268, and at yesterday’s price their owners sit +9%, with the spent-output profit ratio at 1.009: no profit-taking wave, which is what accumulation looks like.

Exhibit 04 cost basis bands

Chart 4. Daily closes since 2023 against the realized price and the short-term holders' cost basis. The bear market's closest approach to the realized price was +10%; the price regained the short-term holders' cost basis on Aug. 19, and Thursday’s spot price sits +9% against it.

And the sellers who capped the 2025 top are fading. Coins unmoved for five years or more moved at 67k BTC a month in 2024 and 47k in 2025… totaling 1.11 million BTC since October 2024, the largest old-coin distribution of any cycle, most of it absorbed by the spot ETFs and BTC digital asset treasury (DAT) companies. In 2026, the pace is 34k a month, 50% of 2024's (Chart 5).

Exhibit 05 old coin distribution

Chart 5. Bitcoin spent each month after five or more years unmoved, by age at spend. The monthly average has fallen from 67k BTC in 2024 and 47k in 2025 to 34k so far in 2026.

2. Positioning: the fast money has left, the base stayed, and everything else is priced for perfection

The futures market shows how little macro money owns bitcoin today. In the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)'s Traders in Financial Futures data, asset managers' net long in CME bitcoin futures was 43.3k BTC in the week of the all-time high and is 18.4k now (-57%); leveraged funds' net short, the futures leg of the cash-and-carry trade against spot ETFs, shrank from 71.4k to 30.6k BTC; open interest is down 51% in dollars (Chart 6). The carry that paid for those shorts has all but gone: the front-month basis averaged 7.9% annualized in the 30 days to the high, 3.9 points over the 3-month bill, and 4.8% in the 30 days to Oct. 21, +0.6 points over (Chart 7). Further out the curve still pays something — the November and December contracts priced 6.3%–6.5% at the Oct. 21 close, about 2 points over bills before costs — but a basis desk never keeps the gross. The ETF's fee, the monthly roll and the margin that must sit at the clearinghouse take most of a point, leaving about 1.5 points over cash, where the same arithmetic left about 3 points in the month of the high and more still on the 9.8% the front month alone offered at the top. Leverage adds little once the long leg is financed at SOFR plus a spread, and what remains does not pay for the trade's tail: the basis inverted to -31% annualized in December 2022 (Chart 7). That arithmetic is why the multi-strategy desks left.

Exhibit 06 cftc positioning

Chart 6. Net positions in CME bitcoin futures by trader group, in BTC. Asset managers' net long is 57% smaller than in the week of the all-time high and leveraged funds' net short is 57% smaller; open interest is down 28% in BTC and 51% in dollars.

Exhibit 07 cme basis vs bills

Chart 7. The CME front-month basis (30-day average, annualized) against the 3-month Treasury bill since 2020; the shaded area is the carry trade's edge over bills. In the 30 days to the high the basis ran 3.9 points over bills; in the 30 days to Oct. 21 it ran +0.6 points over.

Money managers’ 13F filings tell us about many of the institutional sellers, and they are the basis traders and the macro tourists. Reporting institutions held 355k BTC-equivalent of the spot ETFs at the Sept. 30, 2025, quarter-end, the last before the high, and 307k by June 2026 (-14%), and the decline sits almost entirely with the multi-strategy and macro funds, basis desks, and bank trading books that used the ETFs for carry and momentum. Millennium Management, Brevan Howard, Goldman Sachs Group, Capula Management, Farallon Capital, D. E. Shaw, Schonfeld Strategic Advisors, Symmetry Investments and Tudor Investment Corp cut by between 29% and 100%, 68k BTC between the nine of them. That is more than the 48k BTC decline across all 2,200 filers, so every other filer, in aggregate, added (Table 8). Wealth platforms and sovereign funds bought what the tourists sold (Morgan Stanley's wealth arm, Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council added; Horizon Kinetics held), and the non-filer base of advisors, family offices and individuals fell only 6.6% while the price fell 49% (Chart 9). The ETFs' holdings dropped 11% from peak to trough against a 53% fall in the price, and they have added 87k BTC since the June low while leveraged funds' shorts fell: directional buying, not carry (Chart 10).

Exhibit 08 etf 13f named funds

Table 8. The named 13F filers by what they did between the Sept. 2025 quarter-end and June 2026. The nine funds in the first group cut 68k BTC between them, more than the 48k BTC decline across all filers, so every other reporting institution added 20k BTC in aggregate.

Exhibit 09 etf holder bands

Chart 9. Bitcoin held by the U.S. spot ETFs at each complete quarter end, split between 13F-reporting institutions and everyone else. From Sept. 2025 quarter-end to June 2026, 13F filers' holdings fell 14% and the 10 largest filers' stacks shrunk 17%; the non-filer base fell 6.6% while the price fell 49%.

Exhibit 10 etf holdings daily

Chart 10. Bitcoin held by the U.S. spot ETFs since launch, against the price. Holdings fell 11% from the Oct. 9, 2025, peak to the July 13 trough while the price fell 53%; they have added 87k BTC since the June low.

That likely is why this year's scares passed through bitcoin without a sell-off, and it frames the relative-value case. The S&P 500 is 0.8% below a record set on Oct. 6 and the Nasdaq 100 4.5% below its own; gold is 22% below January's high. Bitcoin, at Thursday’s price, is 35% below its high, so a 53% rise only returns it to a price it traded at a year ago (Chart 11). The alternative to all of them is cash. A bet against stocks and hard assets is a bet in favor of fiat, the one asset its issuer has promised, through $2 trillion deficits and a 5% 10-year Treasury, to keep diluting, and that is the one position that makes no sense in the current environment.

Exhibit 11 distance from ath

Chart 11. Last close against each market's highest close since 2020, with bitcoin at the spot price of $81,391 (19:51 UTC, Oct. 22). The S&P 500 is 0.8% below a high set on Oct. 6; bitcoin is 35% below its own, a 53% rise away.

3. Fundamental: the debasement case is stronger than it was at the high

Federal debt stood at $40.44 trillion on Oct. 20, 2026, up from $23.2 trillion at the start of 2020; fiscal 2026 closed with a $1.99 trillion deficit, 6.2% of GDP, and the government’s interest payments run at $1.28 trillion a year (Chart 12). The bond market has begun to charge for it: the 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.31% on Oct. 5, 2026, its highest since 2007, and the Federal Reserve raised rates to 3.75%–4.00% on Sept. 16, 2026, into CPI inflation of 3.7% and M2 growth of 5.7%. A sovereign refinancing $40 trillion at 5% while running 6% deficits faces mounting pressure to inflate, and history points in that direction. Every stress brings the central bank back as a buyer of last resort, as in 2020 and March 2023.

Exhibit 12 us debt interest

Chart 12. Total U.S. federal debt and the annual run-rate of federal interest payments since 2000. Interest costs have risen 2.4x since early 2020.

The AI build-out, usually cast as bitcoin's competitor for capital, is itself a debasement machine: Morgan Stanley expects AI-related debt issuance to reach $570 billion in 2026 and about $1.5 trillion of the build-out through 2028 must be financed externally. If it pays off it will have been financed by credit expansion; if it does not, the losses will be socialized. Either way, the supply of claims on the future grows, and so does the value of a hard money asset with a fixed issuance.

The second fundamental is older than any rate cycle: the need for money that no one can freeze, surveil or reprogram grows with the capacity to do those things, and AI has made that capacity cheap. Tokenized deposits and stablecoins are freezable by design; bitcoin is the only bearer asset of scale with no issuer, and demand for an exit valve rises with every step toward programmable money.

4. Sentiment: the pendulum has swung to “blockchain, not bitcoin” for the third time since I’ve been in the market

Twice before, mainstream finance embraced the technology and dismissed the asset.

In 2015–16 the banks' R3 consortium and The Economist's “Trust Machine” cover made “blockchain, not bitcoin” the respectable position; the episode's lowest weekly BTC close was $231 and the next cycle high was 83x higher.

In 2018–19 the refrain became “blockchain, not crypto.” JPM Coin and Libra were unveiled while bitcoin was left for dead at $3,195; the next cycle high was 20x higher.

The 2026 version is “stablecoins and tokenization, not bitcoin”: banks are piloting tokenized deposits, the CLARITY Act failed cloture vote on Sept. 15, and AI has taken the growth narrative wholesale. Each time the pendulum swung this far, bitcoin was within a year of a cycle low (Chart 13).

Exhibit 13 pendulum

Chart 13. The three episodes in which mainstream finance embraced the technology and dismissed the asset, on the weekly price. From the lows of the first two, bitcoin rose 83x and 20x to the following cycle highs.

The 2026 version shows up in the data. The dollars have come onchain: stablecoins in circulation have grown 129% since the start of 2024, to $304 billion. Meanwhile bitcoin, the asset those rails were built to settle, sits a third below its high (Chart 14). That is dry powder parked inside the system, not capital that has left it.

Exhibit 14 stablecoins vs bitcoin

Chart 14. USD stablecoins in circulation (per DefiLlama) against the bitcoin weekly close. Stablecoin supply has grown 129% since the start of 2024, to $304 billion, while bitcoin sits 35% below its high.

The attention data confirm the neglect: Google searches for “bitcoin” fell to their lowest level in several years on Oct. 13, 2026; the crowd Fear & Greed index that read 71 at the October high printed 5 in February 2026 and 15 at the June low (per alternative.me); ETF flows are flat this month. Bitcoin is 39% off its low with nobody watching. This is a market that is dismissed, under-owned, and rising.

Risks & Mitigants

Drawdown risk. Bitcoin can always go lower. The mitigants are the two records above: in the four prior reclaims after a long spell below the 50-week average, the worst subsequent close was -8.4% from the reclaim level (Chart 2), and every bear has been shallower than the last (Chart 15). Our tripwire: a weekly close back below the 50-week average ($76,540, 6% below yesterday’s spot price) not regained within a month would suggest the reclaim failed.

Exhibit 15 cycle drawdowns

Chart 15. Each cycle's decline from its all-time high, over 400 days. The current cycle's maximum drawdown of 53% is the shallowest on record; on day 381 the spot price stands at -35%.

AI risk. I see three channels of risk from AI: 1) capital competition (the Nasdaq 100 is +18% year to date against bitcoin's -7%); 2) AI-enabled hacking and social engineering ($3.4 billion was stolen across crypto in 2025, and roughly $1.1 billion–$1.3 billion was stolen in the third quarter of 2026 alone: the $387.5 million Bitget exploit, the implanted-Ledger reseller scheme that drained about $91 million by our count, the Coldcard seed-entropy theft of 1,837 BTC from 9,218 addresses); and 3) an AI bust that takes risk assets down with it. The mitigants: none of those losses touched the Bitcoin protocol, only an exchange, a vendor, a device, or a user; the build-out is debt-financed and tax-subsidized (about $570 billion of AI-related debt this year, and since July 2025 a tax code that lets servers and chips be expensed in the year they are bought, a provision scored at $363 billion over ten years) so it widens the deficits that make a fixed supply valuable; and nothing in AI weakens SHA-256 or the signature scheme. An AI bust that forces the Fed's hand is an example of the fundamental case, not a refutation of it.

Quantum computing. 7.1 million BTC, 35% of supply, sit in outputs whose public key is already visible onchain (Chart 16). No cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) exists: the largest elliptic-curve key broken on quantum hardware is 15 bits against bitcoin's 256, and Google's best chip has 105 physical qubits against the fewer than 500,000 its own March 2026 paper says are needed. Galaxy Research's March 2026 report, Bitcoin Is Rising to the Challenge of Quantum Readiness, concluded that “the risk is real but recognized, and the people best positioned to address it are working on it,” and the work is funded: BIP-360, a quantum-resistant output type, was merged in February 2026; Galaxy's Bitcoin Quantum Readiness Initiative committed up to $5 million; and the Bitcoin Security Consortium (nine firms, Galaxy among them) pledged $15 million over three years. The same clock runs on every bank's cryptography; Bitcoin's migration is arguably the most advanced and the best funded.

Exhibit 16 quantum exposed

Chart 16. Unspent bitcoin whose public key is already visible onchain, by cause: 7.1 million BTC, 35.4% of supply, 1.7 million of it in Satoshi-era pay-to-public-key outputs.

What would change our view

Some things that would change our view: a weekly close below the 50-week average ($76,540) not regained within a month; ETF holdings falling through the July 13 trough of 1.22 million BTC; a credible, dated path to a cryptographically relevant quantum machine; or a U.S. fiscal consolidation. None are evidenced today.

We believe the bottom is in, selling pressure has diminished, the debasement case has strengthened, and the crowd has left: these are all reasons we remain bullish on bitcoin.

Bitcoin has proven its ability to run to at least $125k, and we see no reason why it can’t retake that level, and indeed the setup looks favorable.

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