Bitcoin trades near $63,000 today, down about 28% year-to-date and roughly 50% below its October 2025 peak above $126,000. Against that backdrop, Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten told Cointele
Bitcoin trades near $63,000 today, down about 28% year-to-date and roughly 50% below its October 2025 peak above $126,000. Against that backdrop, Swan Bitcoin CEO Cory Klippsten told Cointelegraph he expects the market to bottom in October 2026, roughly a year after the last cycle peak.
Klippsten based his call on a pattern he has tracked across previous cycles. Bitcoin has historically bottomed about 12 months after each bull market top. He cautioned that this pattern rests on only a handful of cycles, so it should not be treated as a guarantee.
He said Bitcoin could still fall further first, toward $57,000 or even $53,000, before a quick reversal. From there, he expects a climb toward roughly $130,000 ahead of the 2028 halving.
This is not Klippsten's first attempt at calling the bottom. In June, he told Cointelegraph that Bitcoin might bottom earlier than in past cycles because long-term holders had built up a record share of supply, around 14.7 million BTC. That accumulation trend suggested strong hands were absorbing sell pressure faster than usual. The October call refines that earlier view with a specific timeline.
Other analysts see the bottom arriving sooner. Markus Thielen of 10x Research has argued that Bitcoin could confirm a bear-market bottom in August with a monthly close above $63,000, a level that would turn several of his firm's cycle indicators bullish. Bitcoin closed near $63,000 on Sunday, putting that threshold within reach but not yet confirmed.
The gap between Klippsten's October timeline and Thielen's August target shows how unsettled the bottom-calling exercise remains. Both rely on different signals, one on holder behavior and cycle spacing, the other on price action and technical closes, and neither claims certainty.
Klippsten's second claim carries more weight for the broader market. He said altcoins are "basically dead" as competitors to Bitcoin in the role of money. In his view, the best future for crypto and decentralized finance is to be absorbed into traditional finance rather than replace it.
Asked which altcoins might still outperform, he pointed to Hyperliquid, but with a catch. He described it as a centralized business wrapped in a token, one that will eventually be treated like an exchange or bank and regulated accordingly rather than valued as an independent monetary asset.
Hyperliquid generated $5.9 million in revenue over the past week, ranking as the industry's fifth-largest DeFi protocol by weekly revenue, according to DefiLlama. The HYPE token has climbed 130% year-to-date, a sharp contrast to Bitcoin's 28% decline over the same stretch. That divergence is exactly what makes Klippsten's dismissal notable: the token he cites as an exception has wildly outpaced Bitcoin this year.
His argument is less about performance and more about structure. A centralized company issuing a token is not the same as a decentralized monetary network, and he expects regulators to eventually treat businesses like Hyperliquid the way they treat any financial firm.
Klippsten's skepticism echoes a broader shift documented by crypto market maker Wintermute in a July report. Wintermute found that growing institutional presence has changed the dynamics of altcoin markets, making rallies narrower and more selective. Liquidity is concentrating in assets institutions favor, while the market's long tail of smaller tokens has weakened.
This matters because past cycles saw broad "altseasons," where capital rotated widely across hundreds of tokens. That pattern appears to be breaking down. Institutional buyers tend to favor a small number of liquid names, leaving the rest of the altcoin market starved of fresh demand.
The combination of these two views, Klippsten's on Bitcoin's monetary dominance and Wintermute's on shrinking altcoin breadth, points toward a market that is consolidating around fewer assets rather than expanding.
Klippsten runs a Bitcoin-only company, so his framing naturally favors Bitcoin over altcoins. That does not make his data wrong, but it is worth keeping in mind when weighing his conclusions.
His bottom prediction also carries real uncertainty. He built it from a small sample of past cycles and openly said the pattern might not repeat. Thielen's competing view, that a bottom could already be forming in August, adds another layer of disagreement among analysts who are all working from similar price data.
For altcoins, the case is more concrete. Falling long-tail liquidity and rising institutional concentration are measurable trends, not just opinion. Whether that adds up to altcoins being fully "dead" as money, or simply maturing into a smaller, more selective market, is a judgment call readers can make with the numbers in hand.
