Bitcoin Holders May Have To Wait 8-18 Months Before New ATH

Glassnode has explained that Bitcoin investors might still have to wait 8 to 18 months before a new all-time high if history is anything to go by.

The Current Bitcoin Transitional Period Has Gone On For 221 Days So Far

In its latest weekly report, the on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has tried to estimate how the BTC cycle may go from here on out. In order to find this out, the firm has defined the various phases of a cycle and has compared the durations of these phases between each of the cycles so far.

The first of these phases is the “bull market.” Glassnode has picked the cycle low as the start point for this phase and the cycle top as the endpoint. The second phase would be the “bear market,” which is simply the reverse of the bull market: it starts at the top and ends at the next bottom.

Finally, there is the “transition” phase, which takes place during the duration between the cryptocurrency setting its all-time low for a specific cycle and the new all-time high for the price. In the context of the current discussion, this is the phase of interest.

Now, here is a chart that shows how long each of these phases has lasted for the last few Bitcoin cycles, and also how the current cycle looks like so far:

The various phases that the previous BTC cycles had to go through | Source: Glassnode's The Week Onchain - Week 25, 2023

As displayed in the above graph, the last three Bitcoin transition phases have varied in duration, with the first of them being 458 days long, while the other two being closer at 770 and 731 days, respectively.

Naturally, this means that the cycles had to spend these number of days following the bear market bottom before the price could reach a new all-time high price.

In the current cycle, it’s not fully certain what phase the market is in right now. If the November 2022 low observed after the crash due to the collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX was truly the bottom for the bear market, then BTC would be inside the transition phase at the moment.

So far, the cryptocurrency has spent around 221 days inside this transition zone, which is clearly significantly lower than the duration that the similar phases of the previous cycles had gone on for.

If the historical range of these transition periods of 458 days to 770 days is any hint, the current market might still have 8-18 months to go before the ongoing transition phase ends and the price sets a new all-time high.

This would only be, of course, if the assumption that the November 2022 low is the cyclical bottom holds true. Naturally, if it’s otherwise, the Bitcoin market would still be inside the bear phase.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $26,900, up 3% in the last week.

Looks like the value of the asset has gone up recently | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Kanchanara on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Glassnode.com