Bitcoin may face one final decline before cycle recovery, Hashdex CIO says
Bitcoin may have already reached its bear market bottom or could face one final decline as its historical four year cycle evolves, according to Samir Kerbage, chief investment officer at crypto asset manager Hashdex.
Bitcoin fell below $70,000 on Friday, extending a selloff that has pushed the asset roughly 45% below its October 2025 peak of approximately $126,000.
The current cycle’s deepest drawdown has been approximately 53%, reached in June, according to Hashdex's CIO Samir Kerbage.
Kerbage said Bitcoin’s current cycle has followed a familiar historical pattern, although the size of its price swings has diminished considerably compared with previous cycles.
Maturing market dynamics
Bitcoin’s annualized volatility averaged roughly 80% during its first two cycles, compared with 53% in the third and approximately 44% during the current cycle.
Returns between successive cycle peaks have also moderated, falling from 1,598% to 250% and then 85%, Kerbage wrote in research circulated by Hashdex.
He highlighted the declining volatility gap between Bitcoin and gold, noting that Bitcoin was nearly ten times as volatile as gold in 2017, compared with roughly twice as volatile in 2025 and 1.5 times in 2026.
“Bitcoin sits 35% below its high and 37% above the June low, so either June was the bottom, earlier and shallower than any before it, or bitcoin still has a last leg to run,”
Expanding underlying market
Kerbage pointed to growing stablecoin adoption and tokenization as evidence that the underlying crypto market continues to expand despite the downturn.
The number of Brazilian wallets holding at least $10,000 in stablecoins has increased 347% since July 2024, while global stablecoin transaction volume reached $1.79 trillion in June, up 125% from a year earlier.
Visa’s stablecoin settlement volume also increased tenfold over the past year, according to figures cited by Kerbage.
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