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

The reason given at the time was ethereum’s move to proof of stake. It sparked bull-market stories right at the lowest point of a bear market: “the flippening”, “the coin that burns itself”. And here’s the first real anomaly, which has nothing to do with price: retail investors don’t leave. They usually capitulate at the lows and come back when the rally 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, 10.8 percent above the June low. And it isn’t alone, because most of the fifty largest coins don’t make a new low that month.

This is where the pattern breaks in a way you can check. In every previous fall, when bitcoin gave way the altcoins dropped with a multiplier of two to three. Here they hold. The second anomaly is about who falls rather than how far, and who falls tells you far more.

The rally that stopped after three weeks

Then comes 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 then it stops dead. The market goes back to test the starting levels, barely breaks them, and begins a distribution that lasts for months. The third anomaly is this: the altcoin season lasted three weeks, when it usually lasts eight to sixteen. It wasn’t so much a weak season as a season that never happened.

What the onchain data said, at that moment

The peak of unrealized gains, the indicator that usually marks euphoria, had been reached in March 2024, a year and a half before the autumn of 2025. The ratio between holders in profit and holders at a loss was around 1.9, against the reading above 4 that had come with every real peak in previous cycles.

The addresses holding more than a thousand bitcoin had shrunk by eight to twelve percent in a few months at the 2017 and 2021 peaks. In the autumn of 2025 they had grown by three percent. 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 one without any of the behavior that always comes with it.

October 6: the day count that works

Two weeks later the market has lost a fifth and 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 was set yesterday at $92,215. Even the depth is what the manual calls for at this point in the cycle.

But that’s where the manual ends. In the year after the halving, bitcoin’s annual candle usually closes a hundred and twenty to a hundred and eighty percent higher. This year, in mid-November, we’re at −1.7 percent: flat, red in fact. The day count followed the theory and the shape of the move didn’t. And it’s the shape, rather than the date on the calendar, that tells you what the market is doing.

The evidence on one side and the evidence on the other

On the other side there are points just as serious and harder to explain. Large holders are accumulating instead of distributing. Retail investors never came in, and without them there’s nobody to sell to at the top. 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 you can say is that the first is made of price and the second of behavior, and previous cycles were always 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 set their all-time high shortly before turning, and volumes are shrinking. Against: whoever holds large amounts is accumulating, the retail saver never came in, unrealized gains are far from euphoria, the ETF flows continue, and the altcoins have held their supports.

What killed the cycle, if it is dead

The second is maturity. Bitcoin today is a recognized asset that sells itself as digital gold rather than as the promise of a technological revolution, and mature assets have longer, gentler cycles. So the victory of the institutional story kills the very pattern that made all this famous.

The third hypothesis is more interesting and less proven: that the cycle has shortened rather than died, three years instead of four, with the red annual candle signaling an early reset. With a single case I have no way to check it. Anyone selling it to you as a certainty is selling you another calendar theory, right after you’ve watched the first one fail.

My position, and what would change it

In practice that means two things. The trades built on the altcoin multiplier, buying whatever moves most because everything rises anyway, are the ones losing most, and they’ll keep losing until the season restarts. And anyone with a long horizon has an accumulation window in front of them, with downside limited by the institutional flows, which is exactly the kind of risk you can size.

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

The position changes if one of three things happens: large holders really start distributing, the ETF flows reverse for more than a quarter, or retail investors come back in force. At that point the cycle peak would go back to being what it always was, the moment when there’s finally someone to sell to.