Bitcoin is two weeks away from marking its longest-ever period in a sideways market range since its April halving, demoralizing bulls positioned for a bigger rally in the final quarter of this year.
“285 days have passed since the bitcoin halving,” CryptoQuant founder Ki Young-Ju said in an X post Friday. “If there is no bull market in 14 days, this will mark the longest sideways post-halving in history.”
Halvings happen about every four years and decrease the block rewards to miners. Bitcoin halving has always been associated with bull rallies, with asset prices increasing by several hundred percent in the months following previous events.
Prices tend to rise with fewer new bitcoin in the open market as long as demand remains constant or increases. BTC jumped above $73,000 to new lifetime highs ahead of the April 14 halving – with some targeting a continued rally to as high as $160,000 by the end of this year. However, prices have largely fluctuated in the $59,000 to $65,000 range since then, nearing a 300-day sideways action record from 2016.
Bitcoin’s boring price action, characterized by continued accumulation by small investors, is being attributed to several reasons, including the U.S. election uncertainty and renewed uptick in the U.S. Treasury yields.
“The higher bond yield move and SPX at record highs are helping to push USD higher, but it is coming at the expense of crypto, where BTC is back to hovering at around the 60k level again,” shared Augustine Fan, head of insights at SOFA, in a Telegram message to CoinDesk on Friday.
“Finally, defunct Mt. Gox’s fresh announcement that it has extended its repayment deadline by a year to Oct 2025 might help to alleviate some supply pressures in the short-run, but it appears that BTC will be in a holding pattern here heading into the final weeks of the election,” Fan added.
Republican candidate Donald Trump is viewed as crypto friendly. He is associated with the new decentralized finance project World Liberty Finance, while the Democratic party is considered less friendly toward the market. A Republican victory is widely expected to fuel a higher Bitcoin move.
Markets often enter a sideways phase where traders and investors reassess their positions, leading to a balance between buying and selling pressures.
Bitcoin would need to break and remain above the $69,000 level to be considered a bullish breakout above the current range, as per CoinDesk market analyst Omkar Godbole. A breakout would mean a resumption of the broader uptrend from October 2023 lows and shift focus to $100,000, a level anticipated by options traders.
Sideways movement can be interpreted as periods of accumulation (where investors slowly buy up supply without moving the price much) or distribution (where they sell off their holdings in a similar controlled manner). This typically leads to a period of high volatility.
Bitcoin is coming out of a seasonally bearish period of August and Septermber, where investors do not make big moves, to a historically bullish October. A CoinDesk analysis shows most gains in October arise in the second half of the month – usually after October 16.
But market strains remain. The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) earlier this week charged multiple market-making and trading firms on consecutive days – igniting debate on whether the crypto market could face more trouble in the weeks before the November elections.
(Omkar Godbole contributed insights.)