Bitcoin may already be in a bear market for two months, according to certain metrics such as the one-year moving average, he says Head of Research at CryptoQuant.
During Thursday’s episode of Milk Road, CryptoQuant’s Julio Moreno he said most of the metrics he uses to index bullish results turned bearish in early November and have yet to recover.
The index measures market conditions using indicators such as network activity, investor profitability, Bitcoin demand and liquidity, and ranges from 0 to 100.
“For me, the latest confirmation is a technical indicator, which is price going below its one-year moving average, that’s a technical indicator that I would say confirms that.”
A one-year moving average is the average price of an asset over 12 months and is used to show long-term trends.
The price of Bitcoin (BTC) began 2025 at around $93,000 and peaked at $126,080 in October before ending the year lower than it started, according to crypto data aggregator CoinGecko.
If Bitcoin is in a bear market, it is contrary to the predictions of many analysts who see 2026 as a bullish year for Bitcoin.
Bitcoin’s bottom could be around $56,000 to $60,000
Past crypto bear markets have seen significant sector-wide declines and it can take years for prices to recover.
Bitcoin is trading around $88,543 as of Friday; however, Moreno predicts that over the next year, the bottom of the bear market will likely be in the $56,000-$60,000 range, based on Bitcoin’s realized price and past performance.
“Historically, what’s happened in previous bear markets, you see the price come down to what’s called the realized price, which is basically the average price at which Bitcoin owners bought their Bitcoin,” Moreno said.
“There’s a lot of upside in a bull market, and then when there’s a bear market, that should be, I would say, maybe the basic expectation for a bottom for a price bottom during a bear market,” he added.
The fall of the bear market is less intense this time
The drop from Bitcoin’s all-time high of $56,000 represents a decrease of roughly 55%, which Moreno said can be seen as a positive, since it was much higher earlier.
“If you want to look at it in a positive way, from the all-time high, the decline is really not as high as we’ve had in previous bear markets when we’ve had 70%, 80% declines. This will be about 55% from the all-time high,” he said.
Related: The last nail in the 4-year cycle? BTC ends the year after the halving in the red
At the same time, Moreno argues that this bear market is already more stable because there have been no high-profile crypto-related collapses.
During the 2022 bear market, the Terra ecosystem collapsed in May, followed by Celsius Network in June and FTX in November, sending shockwaves through the sector.
There are also big institutional players who keep accumulating cryptocurrencies on a regular basis, a larger pool of traders and investors willing to enter the market, and more reliable companies and projects in the sector.
“When we talk about demand again, there are now other types of players that are buying more at times. In previous bear markets, demand was basically, you know, contraction. I would say that structurally, we now have more like institutional or ETFs that are not selling, and also there is some buying.”
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