A 54% drop from the October 2025 peak near $125,000 would, in any previous Bitcoin cycle, have looked like the start of a prolonged bear market. But Wall Street research firm Bernstein isn’t reading it that way. According to a WuBlockchain report Tuesday, analyst Gautam Chhugani kept the firm’s year-end $150,000 target intact, pointing out that the current drawdown is far smaller than the 75% to 90% collapses seen when previous cycles really ended.
Chhugani’s math is a direct challenge to the idea that the selloff has already broken Bitcoin’s structural uptrend. The 75% to 90% range, he noted, has been the hallmark of true bear cycle terminations—the kind that erased the 2013 bubble, the 2018 top, and even the post-2020 run. A 54% correction, while devastating for late longs, fits more comfortably into a mid-cycle reset pattern. The year-end call now requires a roughly 160% rally from current levels under $60,000.
Why This Pullback Doesn’t Look Like a Cycle Top
The difference this time, as Bernstein’s view implies, is partly about who holds the asset. Spot ETF net flows, though choppy, haven’t seen the kind of wholesale exodus that would signal forced capitulation by institutional allocators. Open interest on major exchanges has also reset lower without triggering cascading liquidations on the scale of 2022. That suggests a deleveraging rather than a flight from the asset class.
Chhugani said the firm will keep watching for “signs of life” in capital flows. That phrase is the real tell, because it frames the coming weeks not as a binary crash-or-recovery scenario but as a data-dependent waiting game. If stablecoin minting picks up, ETF subscriptions return, and on-chain volumes stabilize, the narrative flips quickly. In the meantime, the deep drawdowns that killed prior bull markets aren’t on the table yet.
The Capital Flows Everyone Is Watching
Capital flows have become the market’s central obsession, not just for Bitcoin but across crypto. While Bitcoin searches for fresh inflows, institutional engagement hasn’t disappeared. In the tokenization space, Bullish’s $4.2 billion acquisition of Equiniti and JPMorgan’s first live settlement with Ondo show that large players are still building infrastructure. Real-world asset tokenization crossed $20 billion on-chain this spring, a signal that deep-pocketed firms aren’t running for the exits.
Elsewhere, demand for crypto projects with clear institutional ties remains brisk. Sui’s recent 18% surge was driven partly by a Nasdaq-listed firm announcing staking support and a fintech integration with Paga, an $11 billion payment network. Institutional staking demand like that suggests capital is rotating rather than disappearing. If Bitcoin can attract a similar catalyst—be it an ETF milestone or a major corporate treasury move—the lack of a 90% wipeout starts to look deliberate, not lucky.
What Remains Uncertain
Macro conditions and regulatory friction remain the obvious wild cards. The Senate is days away from voting on one of the most significant crypto bills in US history, and major banking interests are pushing to alter a compromise they only recently accepted. That last-minute bank pushback is a reminder that policy risk can still disrupt price discovery even when on-chain metrics look constructive. A negative legislative outcome could easily delay the capital flow revival Bernstein is betting on.
There’s also the question of time. A year-end target of $150,000 requires a sharp second-half recovery. If the usual summer lull prevents the “signs of life” from materializing before September, conviction will fray. The track is narrowing, and the firm’s own language acknowledges that the call now depends less on historical comparisons and more on real-time flow data.
What makes Bernstein’s stance notable isn’t the target itself but the refusal to label this a cycle top. Six months from now, the market will know whether that restraint was justified or whether the outlier was the cycle, not the research note.