Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan says the crypto winter started in January 2025 — most just didn't see it coming until October.
Bitcoin's Bear Market Nobody Noticed — Until Now
There's a version of the current Bitcoin bear market that most people missed entirely. Not because it was subtle, but because the part they were watching held up while everything underneath it fell apart.
Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan laid this out recently in a way that reframes the last 13 months considerably. His argument is that crypto winter began in January 2025, almost immediately after the Trump inauguration. Altcoins — the layer-1s, the mid-caps, most of the retail-facing tokens — started collapsing right then. Solana, Aptos, Avalanche, down 70% or more from January, in a straight line. But $BTC kept climbing toward its October all-time high near $126,000. So nobody called it a bear market.
What masked it, according to Hougan, was institutional buying. Spot ETF inflows were absorbing the selling pressure that would otherwise have dragged Bitcoin down with everything else. Wealth platforms, allocators, corporate treasuries — they were buying throughout the year, and that mechanical demand created the illusion of a two-tier market where Bitcoin was special and the rest was noise. In a sense that was true. But it also delayed recognition of what was already underway.
By October, those same institutions had finally caught up to the cycle. A $19 billion liquidation event confirmed what the altcoin market had been signaling since January. Bitcoin followed everything else down, and suddenly the narrative shifted.
What's interesting now isn't whether this is a bear market — Hougan says flat out it's a "full-bore" crypto winter. What's interesting is the duration argument. Thirteen months. Previous cycles have run roughly the same length, and Hougan believes the exhaustion phase is already forming. He's watching for a rounding bottom, with Bitcoin likely trading sideways between $75,000 and $100,000 through the first half of 2026 before a recovery takes shape.
The selling behavior he's describing isn't panic — it's distribution. Long holders reducing exposure methodically through spot sales, covered calls, and closing leveraged positions. That's a different animal from forced liquidations. It has a floor.
On-chain analyst Willy Woo reads the same exhaustion signal but pushes the recovery timeline further out — Q4 2026 for the end of bearish conditions, with real momentum not arriving until early 2027. The gap between those two views isn't necessarily a disagreement on direction. It's a disagreement on how long quiet accumulation takes before it shows up in price.
Regulatory catalysts are part of Hougan's thesis too. He's watching the Digital Asset Market Clarity Act as a potential inflection point — a bill that would divide oversight between the SEC and CFTC and give crypto projects a formal pathway through the regulatory maze. Whether that passes this year or next shapes the slope of whatever recovery follows.
The cycle didn't disappear. It just arrived quietly, and left most people thinking it hadn't arrived at all.