Bitcoin is at its first real make-or-break support of the cycle, and the market is now in what crypto analyst Dom (@traderview2) calls a “fork in the road.” His message is direct: If Bitcoin cannot stabilize and regain key levels quickly, the structure that has defined this entire run will break for the first time – positioning itself for a downtrend.
“This is the last chance for Bitcoin to hold this level and move higher,” he said in a live analysis current on October 29. “If Bitcoin doesn’t gain a foothold here in the next week or two, I think this is going to fail. And I think we’ll see the mid-to-low $90,000s again.”
Final Standings for Bitcoin’s Staircase Rally
Dom’s base case is not a classic crypto winter. He doesn’t expect an 80% wipeout. Instead, he warns that the coming days will decide whether Bitcoin can defend the “stairwell” structure that has sustained the entire cycle. If that breaks down, he expects a controlled but sustained return – not a collapse, but not a continuation either.
“I don’t think we’re going to be in a year-and-a-half bear market like we always have,” he said. “That will be a thing of the past… unless the world enters a terrible recession like that of the Great Depression.”
The main boundary he is watching for Bitcoin is roughly the $111,000-$114,000 region, which he referred to in the context of reclaimed resistance and VWAP levels. “If that doesn’t happen in a short time frame, I think we have to prepare for a bigger crisis, which will be less than $100,000,” he said. His initial price target at breakdown is around $98,500, which is in line with what he called the 12-month rolling VWAP – “our bull market band this entire cycle.”
Below that, he looks at whether buyers intervene aggressively or not at all. That response, he says, will decide whether $95,000 is local destruction and reset, or the start of something worse.
The reason he considers this moment as “do or die” is that unlike earlier parts of the cycle, Bitcoin no longer immediately recovers from support. Throughout the rally, Dom says, Bitcoin followed one clear pattern: break through a major resistance, retest it once and explode higher. “Every time we removed resistance, we took it as support,” he said. “It’s been a perfect pattern throughout the cycle.”
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That behavior has now changed. After the October 10 liquidation and the brief tension surrounding the Fed decision and Chinese headlines, Bitcoin continued to stall. It broke above resistance, then hung there for “four or five months,” failed to expand, and is now losing momentum at the exact same levels that buyers previously defended with urgency.
“Someone doesn’t believe this is a reduction,” he said. “We’ve had so many bounces for the same price and buyers are just not interested. What will interest them? Logically lower prices.”
For him, this is classic auction theory. In strong uptrends, the first retest of a key level is immediately bought because participants view it as cheap. Now, he says, the order flow shows hesitation, not urgency. That’s how tops actually form in crypto: not one dramatic candle, but buyers refusing to defend the same level for the fifth time.
He also directly pointed out the shallow liquidity on major spot books. On Coinbase he said: “These order books are empty… no one is saving us here.” He described only a small passive bid interest of almost $100,000 – “that’s only 170 Bitcoin. That’s really not much” – and heavy active selling pressure on Binance. “People are actively selling into the marketplace… and we don’t have anyone on the other side to absorb that pressure.” His conclusion: This is exactly the setup that precedes rapid downward air movement when a key level breaks.
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That vulnerability is not hypothetical. Dom says the October 10 crash has already proven how dependent crypto still is on a handful of market makers. “We were essentially sliding through an empty order book,” he said. “It proves how vulnerable crypto really is… If their risk systems say, ‘Hey, we’re not going to quote this,’ the markets will collapse like they did.”
No 80% crash this time
Still, Dom isn’t in the “the cycle is over forever” camp. He thinks the market has changed structurally and most traders are still using a 2021 mental model in a 2025 market.
He argues that Bitcoin is now an institutional instrument, and not a purely speculative retail instrument. “This here is very steady growth,” he said. “The difference… is that this was really pushed by institutions. I think the institutions were the main driver of this cycle… ETFs launched and we kind of stepped up.”
That slow, controlled advance is why he rejects the idea that Bitcoin will repeat the classic -80% decline after the topping. He calls the new flow “parked money” – capital from ETFs, corporate government bonds, allocators and “financial advisors, 401k money” that is not actively panic selling on every 5% move. “They don’t call you every other day and say, ‘Oh, you know, it’s down 5%. Let’s sell it,'” he said.
He also pointed out that this cycle barely doubled the old all-time high instead of going vertical, even producing new highs before the halving. According to him, if the uptrend was moderate and institutional, it is likely to be moderate and institutional.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $110,280.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com