Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy (MSTR), the largest publicly traded holder of bitcoin said on Thursday the X that the crypto winter is over as bitcoin held above $78,000, a price level only reached early on April 22, according to CoinDesk data.
In a Game of Thrones-style image, dressed in a fur coat, a garment not particularly suitable for when winter is over, and mounted on a horse, Saylor, whose company recently added 13,927 bitcoin, bringing its treasury’s total BTC holdings to 780,897, said, “Winter is over,” a statement not all cryptoanalysts agree with.
“Even if winter is over for bitcoin, which I don’t agree with, it’s still very cold for altcoins,” said Jason Fernandes, market analyst and co-founder of AdLunam.
For Mati Greenspan, a former senior market analyst at eToro and founder of Quantum Economics, what bitcoin and the broader crypto market have experienced since the Oct. 10 “flash crash,” which triggered about $19 billion in forced liquidations within 24 hours, doesn’t even qualify as a crypto winter.
“I’m not sure I would classify what we just saw as a crypto winter exactly,” Greenspan said, it was “more of a big setback within a broader bull market.”
However, Greenspan agrees with what Saylor seems to be suggesting: Bitcoin has bottomed out and is likely to go higher from here. “Yes, I think it is very likely that we have seen the bottom,” he said.
Greenspan and other experts say Saylor’s comments, along with his firm’s ongoing bitcoin purchases, indicate a transition to a more permanent institutional bitcoin era. A new cycle marked by market dominance of corporate bitcoin government bonds and a shift in institutional sentiment.
Nation-state adoption
Yet institutional adoption is only one piece of the puzzle.
“Yes, increased institutional adoption will fuel this next stage, but what Saylor lacks is the nation-state adoption that is undoubtedly just around the corner,” Greenspan said.
The crypto founder and market analyst said the crypto industry has seen three distinct adoption cycles to date.
The first, he said, was driven by early adopters in 2013. And then came the “mass retail awakening in 2017,” and now institutional adoption in 2021.
“The fourth and final major driver is nation-state adoption, which I think will happen very soon, especially with the United States suddenly reversing course during the second term of US President Donald Trump,” Greenspan said.
“Imagine central banks adding bitcoin to their balance sheets to maintain price stability, similar to how they have added gold in the past,” he added.
To Greenspan’s point, nation-state adoption is already moving beyond theory and onto the state’s balance sheets. Under Trump, for example, the US is planning a strategic bitcoin reserve, although it is neither formalized nor operational; the government already has about 300,000 BTC. El Salvador continues its daily buying program against a treasury of 7,500 BTC, while China and the UK have around 190,000 BTC and 61,000 BTC respectively. Activity is also emerging at the sub-sovereign level, with entities such as Wisconsin and New Jersey introducing bitcoin exposure within public pension allocations.
