Bitcoin $100,000 Forecast: Fundstrat Analyst Says the Old Rules No Longer Apply
A New Cycle Is Taking Shape, and It Looks Nothing Like the Past
Bitcoin’s journey through the last bear market did not follow the script that many traders had memorized. In previous downturns, the asset collapsed violently, spent months or years in the shadows, and only began moving again after the broader market had fully lost interest. This time, according to Tom Farrell, an executive at Fundstrat Global Advisors, the story has been different. The Bitcoin drawdown was real, but it was far more contained than in earlier cycles. In Farrell’s view, that limited pullback may be one of the most important signals to emerge from the recent market correction. It suggests that the asset is no longer trading the way it did in the early days of the industry. Instead of acting like a purely speculative instrument that gets dumped at the first sign of trouble, Bitcoin has started to behave like a store-of-value asset in the early stages of institutional acceptance. He has urged investors not to expect a sudden break in the macro environment, but rather to watch a slow process unfold over years. That process, he says, is being driven by something far deeper than the latest exchange-traded-fund headlines or interest-rate data: the gradual, almost invisible erosion of the dollar’s purchasing power.
Farrell’s description of the current moment is memorable. He compares monetary devaluation to a “slowly melting ice cube.” At first, the change is impossible to detect in daily life. A cup of coffee costs a little more, a home costs a little more, a college tuition bill feels heavier. But over time, the cumulative effect becomes impossible to ignore. In his view, that steady dilution of the dollar’s real value is the backdrop against which Bitcoin’s entire price history must be understood. Rare assets, he says, tend to come to the foreground during prolonged periods of dollar devaluation, and Bitcoin is perhaps the most accessible rare asset in modern markets. Its supply is mathematically fixed. It cannot be printed. It moves across borders without permission and remains liquid in virtually every time zone. Those characteristics have made it increasingly attractive to investors who are worried about the long-term direction of fiat currencies. Farrell is careful to say that this transition will not feel like a dramatic event. It is more like watching a huge ship slowly change course. But the evidence, he insists, is already visible in the way Bitcoin has reacted to turbulent market conditions. The last bear market should have crushed it. Instead, the price bottomed out with less damage than expected, and the recovery began with a conviction that was missing in previous cycles. To Farrell, that is the signature of a structural change, not a random fluctuation.
A Pullback Wouldn’t Be a Surprise, but the Buyers Are Waiting
Despite the optimism embedded in his long-term thesis, Farrell is not predicting a painless ride to new highs. He fully acknowledges the possibility of another correction in the near term. Bitcoin could easily fall by around 10% from current levels, he says, and a move like that would not fundamentally break the market. In fact, he sees it as a natural part of a healthy bull market — a moment for the market to catch its breath, eliminate excess leverage, and allow new buyers to enter at more attractive levels. His baseline assumption is that if prices drop by that amount, strong demand will re-emerge. There is enough latent capital waiting on the sidelines, he believes, to absorb that kind of decline and push the price into a stronger position afterward. What makes this notable is that this demand is not coming from the same speculative retail crowd that dominated the crypto market in 2017 or 2021. It is coming from a deeper, broader base of investors who have been building positions slowly and methodically, often through regulated products and institutional channels. These investors tend to treat drawdowns as opportunities, not as reasons to panic.
At the beginning of the year, Farrell had a more aggressive target in mind. He set a $115,000 price target for Bitcoin, expecting that the market’s momentum would carry it through that level before the year concluded. But as conditions evolved, he stepped back from that particular number. He no longer expects to see $115,000 in 2026. That adjustment is an important sign of intellectual honesty in the forecasting business, which is filled with analysts who simply move goalposts when markets shift. But while he has walked away from the higher target, he has not abandoned the core of his bullish thesis. Farrell still believes that $100,000 is a realistic milestone that Bitcoin could surpass before the year is out. That may sound like a small distinction in numeric terms, but it has big implications for how investors should frame their expectations. It suggests that the market’s path is no longer a straight line to the moon; rather, it is a stair-step climb in which rallies are punctuated by consolidation, and consolidation eventually gives way to new rallies. It also points to a growing consensus across the financial industry. The idea that Bitcoin could reach $100,000 in 2026 has spread well beyond the crypto-native corners of the internet. Eric Jackson, a prominent investor and CEO of a digital asset-focused wealth manager, has been even more direct, predicting that Bitcoin could reach $100,000 by the end of this year. His long-term target is far more striking: $50 million. Numbers like that invite skepticism, of course, but the fact that a seasoned financial executive would publicly attach them to Bitcoin says something about how far the conversation has come.
The Charts Are Saying Something Important
In addition to the macro story, Farrell has been watching the price charts with the same level of attention that traditional market strategists apply to currencies and commodities. He notes that Bitcoin’s price has risen back above the 200-day moving average after spending a long stretch below it. In technical analysis, this is often treated as a meaningful threshold. When an asset is below that average, it suggests that the dominant trend is bearish and that the market is still digesting the losses from a painful period. When the price breaks back through that level, it historically signals that the trend is turning. Farrell views that particular breakthrough as a positive development, but he says something else caught his eye even more clearly. Bitcoin’s move above the 50-week moving average, which happened a few weeks ago, may be a far more significant statement about the market’s long-term direction. The 50-week average is a much wider lens. It smooths out the noise of daily trading and weekly volatility to reveal the deeper tendency of the price. A clear break above that average is not just a technical curiosity. In Farrell’s view, it could represent a real shift in the market’s long-term regime.
Such a shift is likely to attract the attention of trend-following investors and systematic trading strategies. These are participants who do not make emotional decisions but instead follow clearly defined rules around momentum, moving averages and price breakouts. When an asset spends months below a major moving average and then breaks convincingly above it, many of these strategies will rotate capital toward it. That can create a self-reinforcing dynamic. The more capital flows into Bitcoin because of the technical signal, the more the price strengthens, which in turn confirms the technical signal. This is not a form of market manipulation. It is the ordinary behavior of a changing market that has matured to the point where it is gaining a permanent seat at the table of institutional allocation. Farrell’s decision to emphasize the 50-week moving average is therefore a message to sophisticated investors that the price action is more than a simple rally. It is the beginning of a new chapter, one in which Bitcoin is viewed not as a speculative toy but as a durable asset with a long-term trend.
The Next Catalyst Could Come From Washington
While all of this is happening in the crypto market, another major event is quietly taking shape in the world of government debt. Farrell is keeping a close eye on the Treasury’s next quarterly funding announcement, which is not the kind of thing that typically generates excitement among crypto traders. But in the current environment, it might deserve more attention than any single price chart. The quarterly refunding announcement is the moment when the U.S. Treasury tells the market how it plans to issue debt in the coming quarters. It determines how much supply will be offered at different maturities, including the all-important 10-year and 30-year segments of the yield curve. When the Treasury adjusts its issuance strategy, it sends a signal about how the government views interest rates, bond demand and the dollar’s status in the global economy. Farrell suggests that if the Treasury reduces the issuance of long-dated bonds or becomes more aggressive on the 10-to-30-year part of the curve, the consequences could be significant not only for fixed-income markets but for assets across the entire risk spectrum.
Farrell went as far as to call this a potentially “very strong” catalyst for Bitcoin. The logic is not hard to follow. Long-dated Treasuries are one of the main destinations for institutional capital that wants safety and predictable returns. Any change in the supply or pricing of those bonds could alter the behavior of large asset allocators. If long-dated Treasuries become less attractive because of a shift in supply, or if the government’s financing path unsettles the market, money may begin searching for alternatives. In that scenario, Bitcoin, despite its volatility, could benefit from being the asset that sits farthest away from the traditional government-bond complex. It is not a perfect hedge and would hardly be risk-free, but it represents a form of monetary expression that is entirely outside the control of the Treasury, the Federal Reserve and the conventional banking structure. Farrell’s point is that Bitcoin’s future will be shaped not only by its own technical cycles but also by decisions made deep inside the Washington financial establishment. That is a very different way to think about cryptocurrency than the old idea of a market isolated from the rest of the world. As central banks and treasuries continue to play an outsized role in the global economy, the connection between government debt decisions and crypto prices will only become more important.
The Bigger Picture: A Growing Chorus and an Important Caveat
When all of these threads are pulled together, a coherent picture begins to emerge. Bitcoin is no longer the wild, unpredictable asset that moved purely on internet hype and retail frenzy. It has become a financial instrument that is increasingly judged by the same standards as stocks, bonds and commodities. Analysts now spend their days studying moving averages, Treasury issuance schedules, relative strength indicators and dollar purchasing power. That is a remarkable evolution for an asset that was once dismissed as a niche experiment. And Farrell is not alone in his conviction. Eric Jackson’s headline-grabbing forecast has entered the mainstream conversation, and an expanding coalition of traders, allocators and macro strategists is beginning to ask whether Bitcoin is in the middle of something much larger than a simple market rebound. The longer this debate continues, the more the consensus seems to shift in favor of a continued advance, even if the path is uneven and the timing is uncertain.
The story, however, is not without warnings. Farrell himself has made it clear that short-term corrections remain part of the process. He has trimmed his expectations for the year, acknowledging that markets can change direction quickly and that macro conditions may shift. The same political and economic forces that could eventually push Bitcoin to $100,000 could also produce an environment in which risk assets generally suffer. So-called “risk-off” episodes can arrive without warning, and even the most well-supported bull market in the world will experience painful drawdowns. The smart response to this analysis is not to treat it as a promise of immediate riches. It is to recognize that the underlying drivers of the current cycle are deeper and more durable than previous ones. Dollar devaluation is not going to disappear overnight, no matter how aggressively central banks talk about fighting inflation. Interest in scarcity is not a fad; it is a permanent feature of how markets process declining purchasing power. Bitcoin’s emergence as a global digital asset with a fixed supply puts it in the center of that conversation. Whether the price reaches $100,000, $150,000 or somewhere else in 2026 will depend on how the whole system evolves. But the direction is becoming clearer by the day. The old cycle is over. A new cycle is forming. And for those willing to look closely at the slow, steady signals buried in moving averages and Treasury announcements, the story is no longer about whether Bitcoin will grow — it’s about how fast, and how far, the market is willing to go.
*This is not investment advice.
