The four-year cycle is over, and a day count that works doesn’t prove otherwise

June 2022: where the pattern broke

What happens next isn’t in the script. In the bounce, the altcoins rise more than bitcoin: over the eight weeks from the June low, ethereum gains 54.7 percent against bitcoin. In a phase where historically everyone runs toward the most solid asset, capital does the opposite.

The reason given at the time was ethereum’s move to validation by security, which lights up bull-market stories — “the flippening”, “the coin that burns itself” — while we are at the lowest point of a bear market. And there is the first genuine anomaly, and it isn’t about price: the retail saver doesn’t leave. Historically they capitulate at the lows and come back when the rise is already halfway through.

The anomalies against previous cycles, in chronological order: June 2022, the altcoins outperform Bitcoin in the bounce off the low; November 2022, Bitcoin marks a new low and Ethereum doesn’t; 2024, the retail saver doesn’t capitulate; November 2024, the altcoin season lasts three weeks instead of the historical eight to sixteen.

November 2022: bitcoin under, ethereum over

Ethereum doesn’t follow it: its November low is $1,103, which is 10.8 percent above the June low. And it doesn’t only happen to ethereum: most of the fifty largest coins by size don’t make a new low that month.

This is the point where the pattern breaks in a checkable way. In every previous fall, when bitcoin gave way the altcoins fell with a multiplier between two and three: here they hold. The second anomaly isn’t about how far the market falls, it is about who falls — and who falls says more than how far.

The rally that stopped after three weeks

Then November 2024: Trump is elected, bitcoin gains 37.1 percent in three weeks and ethereum 66.7 percent in five. Volume, breadth, momentum: every indicator says the altcoin season has started.

And instead it stops dead. The market goes back to test the starting levels, barely pierces them, and begins a distribution that lasts months. The third anomaly is this: the altcoin season lasted three weeks, where historically it lasts between eight and sixteen. It isn’t a weaker season, it is a season that didn’t happen.

What the onchain data said, at that moment

The peak of gains not yet taken — the indicator that usually marks euphoria — had been touched in March 2024, not in the autumn of 2025. The ratio between those in profit and those in loss sat around 1.9, against the value above 4 that had accompanied every genuine peak of previous cycles.

The addresses holding more than a thousand bitcoin, the ones that in the 2017 and 2021 peaks had shrunk by eight to twelve percent in a few months, had grown by three percent in the autumn of 2025. And retail activity, which explodes at every all-time high, was at its lows. Three different measures saying the same thing: if that was a cycle peak, it was the first cycle peak without any of the behavior that comes with them.

6 October: the day count that works

Two weeks later the market is a fifth lower and has broken every moving average people usually watch. Today, 25.4 percent below that peak, the price is $92,961, and the low of this fall is yesterday’s, $92,215: even the depth is what the manual calls for at this point in the cycle.

But the manual ends there. In the year after the halving of the reward, bitcoin’s annual candle historically closes between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and eighty percent higher. This year, in mid-November, we are at −1.7 percent: flat, red in fact. The day count respected the theory and the shape of the move didn’t, and what says what the market is doing is the shape, not the date on the calendar.

The evidence on one side and the evidence on the other

On the other side there are things equally serious and harder to explain: whoever holds large amounts is accumulating instead of distributing, the retail saver never came in — and without them there is nobody to sell to at the top — the unrealized gains are far from the euphoria zone, the ETF flows continue, and the altcoins have held their historical supports.

The honest reading is that neither list wins on points. What can be said is that the first list is made of price and the second of behavior. And previous cycles weren’t defined by price: they were defined by behavior.

In favor of a long decline: the timing of the peak matches the theory, the correction has broken the main moving averages, some large coins marked their all-time high shortly before turning, volumes are contracting. Against: whoever holds large amounts is accumulating, the retail saver never came in, unrealized gains are far from euphoria, the ETF flows continue, the altcoins have held their supports.

What killed the cycle, if it is dead

The second is maturity. Bitcoin is no longer the promise of a technological revolution but a recognized asset that tells its story as digital gold, and mature assets have longer, less violent cycles. So the victory of the institutional story kills precisely the pattern that made this stuff famous.

The third hypothesis is more interesting and less demonstrated: that the cycle isn’t dead but has shortened, three years instead of four, with the red annual candle signaling an early reset. I have no way of checking it with a single case — and whoever sells it as a certainty is selling another calendar theory to people who have just watched the first one fail.

My position, and what would change it

Operationally that means two things. That the trades built on the altcoin multiplier — buy whatever moves most, because everything rises anyway — are the ones losing most, and will go on doing so until the season restarts. And that anyone looking at long horizons has a window for accumulation in front of them with a downside limited by the institutional flows, which is exactly the kind of risk you can size.

Put bluntly: the four-year cycle worked because in the end somebody always turned up to buy at the top. This time nobody turned up at the top, and the chart keeps turning anyway.

The position changes if one of these three happens: if whoever holds large amounts genuinely starts distributing, if the ETF flows reverse for more than a quarter, or if the retail saver comes back in numbers — because at that point the cycle peak would go back to being what it always was, the moment when there is finally somebody to sell to.