Bitcoin nears bear market end, targets $250,000

Bitcoin is entering the latter stages of its current bear market, according to Real Vision chief crypto analyst Jamie Coutts. The largest cryptocurrency currently trades around $63,000, marking a roughly 50% decline from its October 2025 all-time high of $126,100. Despite the deep drawdown, the asset has managed to post a 4.45% gain over the past 30 days.

Coutts characterized the price action as a standard downturn, noting that current volatility has fallen by about 50% compared to the previous market cycle. This contraction in volatility suggests the current correction could be less severe than historical precedents. However, he cautioned that markets rarely follow perfect historical patterns. “They just sort of do their own thing. And at the moment, all the trend indicators are obviously bearish,” Coutts said.

The technical picture is beginning to shift slightly. “I'm starting to see a bullish divergence appear on the longer time frames on momentum,” Coutts observed. “That's just telling me that the acceleration, or should I say, the negative momentum is decelerating, but that doesn't mean that we're out of this bear market from a technical perspective at all.”

Market participants frequently point to tightening global liquidity as the primary catalyst for Bitcoin's fourth-quarter slump. Coutts argues that internal network dynamics share the blame. “Onchain demand, which definitely drives price and is somewhat correlated to things like global liquidity and the business cycle, they started to deteriorate as well,” he said.

For market participants establishing positions, Coutts forecasts a recovery to between $200,000 and $250,000 over the next two to three years. He explicitly pushed back against the more aggressive $1 million by 2030 targets circulated by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and ARK Invest CEO Cathie Wood. “The models that I was working with did have about a million by 2032, 2033,” Coutts noted. “It’s just a function of like how much money printing is gonna be required between now and then.”

Beyond traditional finance drivers, Coutts highlighted the potential impact of artificial intelligence on crypto markets. As autonomous agents increasingly spin up their own wallets, he questioned how these systems will approach value storage. “Are they gonna make the same decisions as what humans have?” he said.

On a longer horizon, Coutts warned that the Bitcoin developer community must take decisive action on quantum computing by 2027. Because upgrading a decentralized network takes roughly five years, delays could become critical. He stated firmly that developers who currently dismiss the quantum threat are on the “wrong side of this.”