The founders of CryptoQuant believe that Bitcoin will not experience a major crash of more than 50% like past bear markets, and instead expects a sideways movement in the future.
Bitcoin’s realization ceiling has slowed recently
In a new post on X, Ki Young Ju, founder and CEO of CrypotQuant, talked about how capital inflows to Bitcoin have dried up recently. The on-chain metric cited by Young Ju is “Realized Cap,” which measures the total value of cryptocurrencies assuming that the value of each token in circulation is equal to the value at the time of the previous token exchange.
So what Realized Cap means is the total amount of capital that investors across assets have put into the network. Therefore, a change in the indicator means an outflow or inflow of capital to BTC. As shown in the graph above, Bitcoin's realization cap grew rapidly from late 2023 to late 2025, indicating that the coin was receiving continuous capital injections.
Recently, however, the upward trend of this indicator seems to have broken, and its value is facing a slight net decrease. In the past, bull markets have sometimes coincided with an upward trajectory in the realized cap, leading to a transition from weak inflows or net outflows to a bearish phase.
Given that the trend of the indicators suggests the latter type of market conditions, a bearish transition may be occurring for cryptocurrencies. That said, analysts note that the latest cycle is not the same as previous cycles.
“Liquidity channels are now more diverse, so timing inflows is meaningless,” Young Ju said. “Long-term holding by institutional investors has eliminated the old whale retail sales cycle.” Examples of demand channels that didn't exist before include treasury companies like Strategy and investment vehicles like spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
“I don’t think we’ll see a more than -50% crash from ATH like in past bear markets,” said the CryptoQuant founder. “The next few months are just going to be boring.” It remains to be seen what trajectory Bitcoin will ultimately take.
In other news, it's not just on-chain demand as measured by Realized Cap that has declined recently. Demand from retail investors has also been lost, as highlighted by CryptoQuant community analyst Maartunn in his X post.
The metric shown in the graph is the 30-day percentage change in volume related to retail investors, who are the smallest investors on the network. This metric has recently turned negative, meaning that trading volume below $10,000 has been decreasing on a monthly basis.
This hasn't changed even after Bitcoin's recent surge. “The crowds are not back yet,” Martin pointed out.
BTC price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is hovering around $89,900, up 2% over the past seven days.
