Bitcoin Bull Run Hasn’t Died—It’s Evolving, Says | Crypto News
Bitcoin’s grinding tape, tamed volatility and repeated, incremental all-time highs are usually not symptoms of a failed cycle but evidence of a market altering palms and altering character, according to Alex Thorn, Galaxy’s head of firmwide research in an interview launched October 23.
Bitcoin Bull Run Gone Quiet: Here’s Why
The researcher argues that the driving force capping bitcoin’s near-term upside is exogenous—US–China tariff risk—reasonably than any structural deterioration in the asset’s fundamentals or adoption. “I don’t yet think it’s more existential than that for the bull market,” he said, describing the current price motion as “sort of crab,” with the market “still” climbing a wall of fear.
The price dialogue hinged on two linked observations. First, bitcoin is just not trading like gold yet because “markets move on the margins,” and marginal flows still deal with BTC as risk. Second, those margins are shifting, with passive, long-term allocators steadily absorbing distribution from older cohorts. “Significant distribution from old hands to new hands” has created resistance, he said, but that course of is “healthy,” widening possession and maturing the market. He framed a psychological and structural line of demarcation at six figures: “Maybe we delineate there the pre-$100K bitcoin world versus the post-$100K bitcoin world. I think it’s going to look a lot different.”
He contends gold’s habits helps clarify the current inter-asset divergence. “This still is the debasement trade…and it’s the anti-US government trade,” he said, noting that current gold strength has been “all offshore,” with bids arriving “during European and Asian hours,” constant with “foreign central banks and large…sovereign wealth funds” diversifying away from US publicity.
By distinction, the bitcoin price is pinned to risk urge for food at the sides of the market. That said, he expects the asset to converge toward a gold-like profile as possession migrates to establishments: “BlackRock’s chilling the digital gold narrative…Fidelity, this is how they talk about it,” he said, including that as more provide strikes into the palms of registered investment advisors and passive automobiles, BTC “will…trade a lot more like a risk-off, non-sovereign scarcity hedge asset.”
The near-term overhang, in his view, is the tariff scare that adopted statements on October 10 about potential 100% levies on China, which “caused” a leverage washout and stalled a strong October. “Quite simply an abatement of the tariff war between the US and China…would sort of set us right back on course in risk markets,” he said, anticipating a compromise reasonably than a “protracted bloody trade war.”
Thorn also downplayed the next Federal Reserve assembly as a catalyst for bitcoin’s direction, while acknowledging that with official financial data delayed, the Fed’s own proprietary datasets may make its communication unusually market-relevant: “They’re going to have data. We don’t have data, but they’ll share the data.”
Galaxy Lowers EOY Bitcoin Price Prediction
Against that backdrop, he marked down—but didn’t abandon—his year-end targets. “At the beginning of the year, I was calling for $150,000 and then $185,000 in Q4… I am going to materially draw down that prediction to maybe like $130,000 by EOY,” he said.
Thorn described 2025’s path as a slow, unstable stair-step greater—“from like $100k to…$74k to then $126k to now $108l”—with realized volatility declining. To illustrate the regime change, host Joe Consorti highlighted a 90-day realized volatility studying close to 29, far below the 2017 and 2021 cycle peaks, and summarized the shifting drivers: “It’s more of a macro trade than anything…moving much further into…being impacted…by the macro regime.”
Institutional distribution channels had been a recurring theme. The Galaxy research head pointed to wealth-platform access and custody bank initiatives as late-cycle but highly effective accelerants. Thorn cited Morgan Stanley’s transfer to let advisors advocate a small allocation (2-4%) through spot ETFs and said that three of the 4 largest global custody banks have either launched or announced digital-asset custody, with one notable holdout.
The implication, he argued, is that the ETF bid and wirehouse adoption are changing the outdated, concentrated holder base: “The era of the early bitcoin adopter is now finally, I think, fully coming to an end. And now you’re in…whatever that stage is…this is going to be a widely owned macro asset in everybody’s portfolio.”
NEW EPISODE: Over The Horizon
Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) joins me to talk about:
– Why markets are so anxious
– Institutional adoption and Bitcoin’s next period
– AI CapEx & classes from the dot-com increase
– The future of digital asset treasuries pic.twitter.com/pVuKs3MWJH— Horizon (@Be a part ofHorizon_) October 23, 2025
Macro cross-currents complicate the timing. The AI capital-expenditure increase—he called it “the most important trend in markets”—is either nearing a speculative blow-off or, in a more geopolitical framing, just coming into a Manhattan Project–fashion national-priority section. If the latter proves right, the knock-on results for liquidity, charges, vitality and semiconductors could possibly be bigger and longer-lived than typical tech cycles.
But for bitcoin particularly, he stored coming back to tariffs as the decisive near-term swing issue and to microstructure as the explanation the chart feels both heavier and sturdier than past cycles: a passive ETF bid absorbing OG provide at psychologically vital spherical numbers, without the “massive uplifts” that once adopted recent all-time highs.
The base case he outlined is just not euphoria but endurance. Or, as he put it more bluntly earlier in the dialog, the bull run hasn’t died—“it’s evolving.”
At press time, BTC traded at $111,183.
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