With 2025 behind us, a lot of people are now asking if the four years cycle is over?
Technically we did have an ATH in Q4 of 2025, reaching 125k at the beginning of October 2025, as the cycles predicted, just to crash a week later on the big crush on October 10th 2025. The 125k was much lower then people expected though. Since then the overall sentiment around Bitcoin has been down, and the price has been hovering around 90k.
The questions that keeps emerging, is this the top, how much we have left from this cycle, is this time different?
Let’s take a look at some charts from the cycles and see can we drawn some conclusions. After all, history doesn’t repeat itself but for sure it rhymes.
A lot of the market participants keep asking the question, is this time different? Some have already declared it to be so, having in mind all the institutional investors that are now in the game. Bitcoin is no longer in the hands of retail. It’s the big boys who push the price up and down.
Furthermore, the miners are now having less impact on the price. The main driver behind the cycles is the number of new Bitcoins that is entering in circulation and the halving’s that cut that in half. But as each new halving happens, its importance is fading away. It’s one thing to cut the inflation from say 20% to 10%, as it was in the first cycles, and not from 1% to say 0.5%. The effects are totally different.
This said, I still remain skeptical of all the theses, and to find the answer to the question, will this time be different, we just need to wait and see. 2025 is behind us and there are some flavors of the cycle, but 2026 should be the year when we really confirm is this time different or not.
As reminder here are the periods for Bitcoin cycles between halving’s, that happened in 2012, 2016, 2020 and 2024.
- First cycle from Dec 28, 2012 to July 7, 2016
- Second cycle from July 8, 2016 to May 11, 2020
- Third cycle from May 12, 2020 to Apr 19, 2024
- Fourth cycle from Apr 20, 2024 till now
The first years from 2009 to 2012 are discounted.
BTC Price During Cycles
Here is the chart for the Bitcoin price, split in cycles with number of days after each halving.
This chart is in absolute numbers for the price and as we can see the first cycle in yellow is almost nonvisible. Still, we can draw some conclusions even from here.
The peak in the second and the third cycle happened somewhere around 540 days after the halving. That is somewhere around a year and a half after the halving. Adjusted for this cycle that is in October 2025. But we can notice also that the third cycle had somewhat of double top and is a bit weird, while the second one had a clear blow of the top peak in one go. Also, this last one cycle we reached a new ATH for the first time before the halving.
We do see some similarities here, with sort of double top, but pulled in much earlier and with much less volatility.
Log Scale Price Chart
When we put the cycle prices on a log scale, we get this.
Much better visibility here, especially for the first cycle. The last one are now sort of skewed.
Again, we can see similarities, but obviously each cycle is slightly different. The first cycle had a very early peak, somewhere around one year after the halving. The second one had a top year and a half after the halving, while the third one had double top, the first time a year after the halving and the second time year and a half after the halving.
What is for sure from this chart is that the top has been in the range of one year to a year and half after the halving. One year was in April 2025, while another year and a half is in October 2025. All things considered, the cycle should be over and an ATH reached in October 2025, and we should wait for a new ATH in 2028. But as already said, 2026 will be the year where we can conclude this for sure.
Price Adjusted Chart (Scaled)
One more what to look at cycles is simply by adjusting the previous price with a coefficient for better visibility to the current price.
The first cycle is with a 528 factor, the second one with 17.6 and the third one with 4. These are price multipliers. Don’t take the price for actual for the previous cycles, apart from the last cycle in red.
From here we can see the top overlaps somewhere around the 540 days after the halving. We can also see the massive growth in price in the first halving that acts as an outlier on the chart. There is also another spike for the first halving around the 1.5 year mark after the halving. This is giving the more weight on the 1.5 year mark.
As for the current cycle (the white line), we can see that it is very smooth one compared to the others. We can barely notice the spikes and the downs. The volatility has obviously dropped when compared to the other cycles! If one thing is different this time, that is that the volatile is much lower now.
Volatility
Volatility is one of the key metrics for Bitcoin. It’s volatile and many say it will remain volatile. It is why the big returns. Not everyone can stomach its volatility, but the ones who do are greatly rewarded. Let’s see how this metric is doing trough the cycles.
This is a 30 days volatility chart. There are others one like 90, 180 etc, but this one is usually the standard for the industry, and overall they re similar.
Here we can obviously see that the volatility is going down. In the first cycle the volatile was the highest, up to 250% and a lot of times to 150%. In the second cycle it reached 150% on a few occasions, and in the third cycle in was in the range of 50% to 100%.
In the last cycle that we are in, in the first 400 days, it is around the 43% mark, and it has even dipped below 30% in the last months. So overall the volatility is going down, and Bitcoin is not as volatile as in the past.
When we continuously plot the volatility, without the breaks in the cycles we have this:
Here again we can clearly see the drop in the volatile. although there were some spikes back in 2018 and 2020. This happens usually on the way down. In 2020 the spike is due to the Covid drop in price.
As for the previous we can see that in the last years Bitcoin volatility has been around 50%. With this kind of volatility, the pullback for Bitcoin is also below 50%, that is much less then the previous cycles, of 70% and 80% corrections. Although on occasion we do have higher volatility then 50% even now, so stronger pullbacks are still in play.
In Summary
Bitcoin do behaved like in the cycles in 2025, but just with much less volatility. The one thing that is different now is that the volatility is lower. Although it is much higher then the other assets, like stocks, still compared against the previous years, when there were even higher ups and downs, this time it is not happening. If in 2026 we do not see another ATH, then the cycle will be pretty much in place, just not as volatile. If we do see another ATH in 2026, and that continues in the years afterwards, then we can for sure say the cycles are over.
Bitcoin is no doubt in a different category now than in any of the prior cycles. It has a two trillion market cap, it is an institutional asset with a lot of big investors. It is also a macro asset now. The global macro economy and events impact it much more. Global events can drive the BTC price a lot.
