The current feeling is that it is increasingly difficult to describe it with terms like 'bull market or bear market'; it feels more like the entire crypto space is experiencing a long-term structural retreat. Bitcoin is not a false breakout or a facade, but rather it has genuinely become unsellable. Capital is voting with its feet, withdrawing from the crypto market and flowing into assets like gold and tech stocks that either have broad consensus or can continuously generate cash flow.
The awkwardness of Bitcoin lies in the fact that its rise increasingly relies on imagination rather than incremental capital. Once liquidity tightens, there is almost no buffer for price declines. Without new stories or a profit-making effect, social capital will not enter; if retail investors do not buy and new 'fresh capital' does not come in, the market will naturally cool down gradually. Institutions see this most clearly; they will only seriously allocate resources when real systemic risks erupt, and the current world is not chaotic enough to require hedging with Bitcoin.
The market has not collapsed, but activity has clearly declined. What remains is primarily arbitrage capital, short-cycle trading, and quantitative strategies. This state of the market is often more dangerous than a downturn—because it implies that consensus is quietly disintegrating.
What is even more concerning is that Bitcoin's positioning is becoming ambiguous. It is becoming more compliant and increasingly accepted by the mainstream, but the early core narrative of 'anti-establishment, decentralized, and circumventing regulation' is constantly weakening; yet at the same time, it has not truly evolved to the asset level of gold, where 'wealth naturally allocates'—stuck in the middle, unable to advance or retreat.
As for new concepts like stock tokenization and prediction markets, they seem more like lifting traditional finance. In the reality of high interest rates and strong regulation, capital recognizes only two types of things: those that can continuously make money or those that are explicitly endorsed by the system. Currently, the crypto market has not firmly established itself on either side. $BTC
