Late 2025 was supposed to be that golden year for a massive market pump, it was primed, the market aligned well and everything looked so good and solid, and we got that mini pump in 2025.
January that was supposed to be the precursor to the big pump at the end of the year, but Q4 came and market price continued to shrink from that January pump instead of actually pumping even harder.
BTC was stipulated to do a X3 from its previous ATH of 69k which would easily put it in that 190k range,but it didn't.
It went from 20k from 2017 to 69k which was a decent X3 and while the market won't always mirror previous events, it somehow follows that framework from the previous cycle.
BTC didn't bleed badly, but also didn't pump the traditional bull market pump, even after all that institutional interest and all that, but I guess a lot of BTC Maxis didn't get to lose much money, even though they didn't make life-changing money either.
The cycle's biggest gain was probably making a X2 or X3 for holding BTC early, which isn't life-changing, but at least not as terrible as losing -93% on your alt bag.
So this is another decent cycle for BTC holders as they didn't money, and can keep holding their bag and waiting for that 2028 market rally..
As for regrets, I think 90% of people had regrets for this cycle; for projects, expectations and outlook. If you look carefully you'll see that we've lost 2 to 4 Hive whales, they've completely left the chain, perhaps due to the expectations they had and how it never panned out well.
There are those who left too, because they probably moved on to other ventures and abandoned crypto completely. These movements were probably because of the expectations that weren't met, and this is evident in his lukewarm this cycle is.
If you take a huge outlook, you discover that according to TAs (technical analysis) the market was supposed to bottom this year, at least around September/Oct, but the market isn't aggressively dumping.
Are we going to see a sharp dump and another -50% dump for alts before December or is this the bottom and we are no longer going to bottom?
It makes sense that the market didn't pump too hard and so it's not going to dump to oblivion. Q2, 3 and 4 experienced some slow bleed, it didn't even look like it was a bull run year, so perhaps it'll make sense to think that part of the dump and correction that should have happened in 2026 already happened in 2025.
99% of alts are already at -95% at it just looks like it dumping another 50% to correlate with the idea that the market will bottom out in October means that this bear market will be bloodiest in the history of bear markets.
It's not going to be impossible if it is, afterall, this cycle is where we've had the most scammers, criminal founders, oversaturation, insider info from Trump disrupting the market and milking retail.
So I won't put it past this last cycle being the worst on the history of crypto.
However, it makes sense that we've bottomed early, since we've been slowly bleeding from Q2 2025.
Make no mistake 50% of Alt projects have shutdown and while we might be sad that we're not top with the likes of Hyperliquid or arbitrum, but we've thrived and survived even though we're not where we want to be.
