It has become fashionable lately to reject bitcoins the four-year cycle – and the inevitable boom and bust it entails – as an anachronism.
Just in the past week, Bitwise’s Matt Hougan and ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood have thrown their considerable weight behind the idea of rejecting the four-year cycle. Each noted the ETFs, along with regulatory and institutional acceptance, have blended bitcoin into the traditional financial system. Bitcoin is no longer a fringe asset and there is no reason for it to follow the same pattern today as it did years ago.
Definition of cycle
The four-year cycle is a price pattern linked to bitcoin’s halving events, which occur roughly every four years. These halvings reduce by 50% the amount of bitcoin rewarded for mining a block. The 50% cut is believed to lead to a supply shock and force a larger price increase.
After the big bull move comes a crash into the 80% area and then a steady grind higher into the next halving event.
Chartists like to point to the bull runs (and subsequent crashes) that occurred after the 2012, 2016, and 2020 halvings, and say things work out the same way for the 2024 event: the sharp run higher that eventually topped out in October 2025 above $125,000, and so that’s where the market is now.
Fidelity’s Timmer weighs in
An early supporter of bitcoin among the traditional finance crowd, Jurrien Timmer, asset management giant Fidelity’s director of global macro, sees nothing in his charts that says the four-year cycle is dead.
“If we visually create all the bull markets, we can see that the October high of $125,000 after 145 [weeks] of rally fits pretty well with what you would expect,” Timmer said earlier this week.
As for the next, it would be winter. Timmer noted that subsequent bear markets tend to last about a year. “My sense is that 2026 could be a ‘off year’ (or ‘off year’) for bitcoin.” The grant, he concluded, is in the $65,000-$75,000 range.
