How is this bull market different from previous bull markets?

Author: David Canellis, Blockworks; Translator: Baishui, Golden Finance

If you believe in the great fractal energy, then it will completely determine the price of Bitcoin in the next few months.

As far as we know, Bitcoin hit an all-time high of nearly $73,740 in March, which was the peak of the current cycle.

That would mean that the bull run is over. Bitcoin and Ethereum are trading down 5% today - causing losses for almost all other currencies except stablecoins - which certainly doesn't help boost market sentiment.

But the problem with markets is that you never know when they will peak.

Looking back, Bitcoin's all-time high in December 2017 was clearly the top point for the next three years, even if altcoins will continue to rise for a few more weeks.

When Bitcoin first broke above $61,000 in March 2021, it was not confirmed that Bitcoin would plunge another 13% by November (just eight months later) after retracing nearly in half.

At some point, it became clear that the bull run had run its course. The bears may have made that point earlier than the bulls, but the ensuing Terra implosion in May and the subsequent cascading liquidations and bankruptcies really nailed it regardless.

When it comes to price, all we can really do is look backwards. It has been 585 days (about 20 months) since Bitcoin bottomed in November 2022, which for convenience we will refer to as the start of the current bull run.

This chart depicts the contrast between bull markets. So far, so good.

Using this very basic definition, the first two bull markets peaked after about 840 and 1,060 days. So if we are destined to repeat these periods - a big if - then we are firmly in the second half of the cycle.

In the past two quarters, Bitcoin’s price has increased 6x and 3x, respectively. Even after the recent drop, Bitcoin’s return since bottoming out is now 4x year to date, putting it in the middle of its recent bull run.

If Bitcoin did indeed peak in March, it would be the shortest bull run cycle on record, not including its first year of price discovery.

In the past two bull runs, most of Bitcoin’s gains occurred in the following 200 days, with gains of 20x and 100x from the bottom, respectively.

We know that each cycle has diminishing returns — so whatever moves Bitcoin does may not be as explosive. That could leave crypto investors eager to take big profits elsewhere. Historically, altcoin seasons have helped close the gap.

But as is now well documented, there has been no altcoin season so far in this cycle, at least not in the same sense as in previous periods.

According to the definition outlined in the last edition of the Empire Newsletter, there have been three distinct altcoin seasons in the past seven years. Two of them coincided with the Bitcoin halving, and each ran for about a year and a half and ended when Bitcoin peaked.

Bitcoin halving is marked with a dotted line and altcoin season is marked in blue

A shorter altcoin season lasted nearly seven months from late 2018 to the middle of the following year.

This time around, neither ETH nor TradingView’s OTHERS index, which tracks the market capitalization of all cryptocurrencies outside the top 10, has recovered to its all-time high valuations since 2021.

Altcoin season will either be late or not come at all, depending on how bullish or bearish you are.

Either way, the outcome of this bull run will be very different from the others to date.