Standard Chartered Calls $59K the Bottom; Galaxy Says Brace for $40K 🥶

Standard Chartered analyst Geoffrey Kendrick declared on Friday that bitcoin's cycle low is locked in at $59,000, a 53% decline from the Oct. 6, 2025 all-time high of $126,000, and wrote in a client note that "Winter is over. Welcome back to crypto Spring." CoinDesk data shows $BTC touched $59,375 on June 5 around 18:00 UTC and hovered just below $64,000 at the time of writing. Kendrick, who maintains year-end price targets of $4,000 for ether and $100,000 for $BTC, pointed to two catalysts that ended the latest crypto downturn. The first was the conclusion of a sharp wave of selling in spot bitcoin ETFs, with total redemptions exceeding $5.72 billion since the second week of May, which he said was partly driven by investors freeing cash to participate in SpaceX's initial public offering. SpaceX shares began trading on Nasdaq on Friday at approximately $150 and were trading roughly 26% above the IPO price, with tokenized contracts tied to the company on Hyperliquid recently changing hands at valuations as high as $2.4 trillion. The second catalyst, according to Kendrick, was the prospect of a G7-brokered U.S.–Iran peace deal that could be signed ahead of the June 15–17 G7 summit in Evian, which he said would cap oil prices, ease rising U.S. Treasury yields, and relieve macroeconomic pressure on crypto markets.

Galaxy Research reached a markedly different conclusion in a data study released this week. Alex Thorn, Galaxy's head of firmwide research, wrote that the four-year bitcoin halving cycle is compressing, a shift he said changes where the cycle floor ultimately settles. Galaxy's analysis found that only four of 13 signals that marked every prior cycle bottom have triggered and that the current 51% drawdown is far shallower than the 77% to 85% drops that ended earlier cycles. Because past cycle bottoms arrived 12 to 13 months after each top and the current cycle is only eight months past its October peak, Galaxy's base case places the true floor between $40,000 and $46,000 by late 2026.

Both firms, however, now reject the 80% collapse that ended each of bitcoin's prior market cycles, marking a notable point of agreement between the two research desks. Kendrick said he is watching for renewed corporate buying, positive spot ETF inflows, and progress on a U.S.–Iran deal over the coming days to confirm that the floor is durable, and he reiterated his view that $ETH will outperform $BTC through year-end.