21Shares Admits It: Bitcoin's Four-Year Cycle Is Still Alive, Kicking, and Below $60K 🪦

Crypto investment firm and ETF issuer 21Shares conceded on Wednesday that Bitcoin's four-year cycle has not been broken, even as $BTC fell below the $60,000 mark for the second time this month. "Heading into 2026, we believed that Bitcoin's four-year cycle could be finished," the firm wrote in its latest "State of the Market" report. "Six months in, we have to be honest: price action still looks familiar." Bitcoin was recently changing hands at $59,781, down 52% from its all-time high of $126,080 set in October 2025.

While the historical pattern tied to the quadrennial halving of Bitcoin's mining reward has not broken, 21Shares said the cycle has bent. "Market structure has clearly changed: ETF ownership is increasingly institutional and the current drawdown of roughly 50% remains far milder than the 80%+ bear markets of prior cycles," the firm wrote. $BTC is also holding above its on-chain aggregate cost basis of $54,000 according to Glassnode data, a level the firm views as the threshold for "outright capitulation."

Other 2026 projections from 21Shares have also missed the mark. The firm anticipated crypto ETFs would approach $400 billion in assets under management this year, but data from CoinGlass shows nearly $3 billion has exited crypto ETFs over the last quarter and crypto ETFs collectively are down almost $5 billion since the start of the year. Separately, 21Shares forecast a $1 trillion stablecoin market cap, $300 billion in DeFi total value locked, and $250 billion in assets under management for crypto treasury firms (DATs), all of which have run into regulatory uncertainty, persistent DeFi exploits, and falling prices.

Shares in Bitcoin treasury firm Strategy (MSTR) slid to their lowest level in more than two years on Wednesday, falling as low as $97.30 roughly 30 minutes after the opening bell and recently trading at $98.05, a nearly 5.5% decline on the day, according to Yahoo Finance. On-chain data adds further context: the LTH/STH SOPR ratio has sat below 1 for most of the period and recently dropped to about 0.7, indicating that short-term holders, not long-term ones, are driving selling pressure. The Bitfinex Alpha report also noted that market makers' net gamma exposure has turned negative while Bitcoin trades below the gamma flip level of roughly $68,000–$70,000, a setup that tends to amplify rather than dampen volatility.