Bitcoin now prints green candlesticks on the weekly and daily time frames, and this raises the question of whether this is so the worst is already over or perhaps the floor is still months away.
An interesting analysis of Bitcoin’s price action over several years pushes back against the growing optimism, pointing to a pattern that has held for more than a decade and suggesting that time, and not just price, may still be working against a confirmed bottom.
Every Bitcoin bear market has taken more than a year to bottom out
If we go back to 2013, Bitcoin’s bear market cycles have followed a consistent sequence when it comes to the one metric that matters most, time. Each Bitcoin bear cycle varied slightly in severity, but the time it took to end it was surprisingly consistent.
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According to one According to the technical chart, noted by a crypto analyst who goes by the name Xremin, the bear market in 2024 stretched to about 426 days before a bottom formed. The 2017 cycle followed by roughly 363 days, while the bear market following the 2021 rally lasted about 376 days.
However, the current cycle is only about 190 days into the correction phase. Naturally, Bitcoin’s peak above $126,000 in October 2025 is taken as the starting point of the bear market correction. That puts it at just over half the duration of previous cycles.
Bitcoin is already down about 43% from that all-time high. However, At this stage there is a bottomAccording to the analyst, this would mean that Bitcoin has suddenly broken a 13-year pattern without any apparent structural change to justify it.
Could the bear market already be happening?
If we hit the bottom at this point, it would mean that this cycle has resolved itself in less than half the time it took for each previous cycle to find its bottom. However, the bull scenario for an early bottom is not without substance. Market participants with this view could easily argue that the Bitcoin and crypto ecosystem as a whole now has structural dynamics that didn’t exist every previous bear market.
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An example is the American Spot Bitcoin ETFswhich now collectively hold around 6.5% of Bitcoin’s market cap, with the highest being around 10% at the October 2025 peak. Another example is the The Department of Labor will publish a proposed rule in March 2026 that will create a safe harbor for retirement plan fiduciaries adding crypto to 401(k) menus.
These are meaningful developments, and they could well reduce the severity of the eventual downturn compared to previous cycles. However, they only talk about price depth, not time.
Institutional demand could hold Bitcoin back of a drop to $50,000 or $40,000, but it does not automatically accelerate the psychological and market structure process that creates a true cycle bottom. The historically reliable four-year halving cycle suggests that a sustainable bottom may not emerge until closer to the fourth quarter of 2026.
Featured image from Pixabay, chart from Tradingview.com