Bitcoin Bear-Market Bottom Pegged Near $44K, Up to 30% Below Spot

Bitcoin News

A prominent mining-pool founder has placed the floor of the current Bitcoin (BTC) downturn between $42,000 and $44,000, implying roughly 30% of further downside from a spot price near $60,000. Jiang Zhuoer, who runs the LeBit mining operation, argues the cycle low will most likely print in the fourth quarter of 2026. His call is not drawn from chart patterns alone but from a blend of corporate-treasury valuation signals and a long-running four-year cycle model. The forecast lands while the broader market sits deep in Bitcoin bear market territory, and it reinforces an increasingly defensive tone among veteran operators who lived through the 2022 collapse.

Central to the thesis is Strategy's mNAV, or market net asset value multiple — the ratio of the company's share price to the per-share value of the Bitcoin it holds. A reading above 1.0 signals investors are paying a premium for the treasury; a reading below 1.0 signals the market values the firm at less than its coins. Jiang notes that the metric has slid to 0.72, sitting just above its prior cycle trough. In his reading, that compression reflects peak pessimism toward leveraged Bitcoin-proxy equities, a condition that historically appears near, but not exactly at, the asset's price bottom.

The 2022 analogue underpins the timing. Strategy's mNAV bottomed near 0.7 on 11 May 2022, when Bitcoin traded around $31,017. The token itself did not reach its true low until roughly six months later, on 21 November 2022, when it fell to $15,476 — by which point the same valuation multiple had already recovered toward 1.2. The pattern suggests the equity-side metric leads spot price by about half a year. If that relationship holds again and mNAV is near its floor now, the implication is that Bitcoin's price bottom remains several months out rather than already behind us.

A separate input is the four-year cycle framework, which treats price like a bouncing ball whose rebounds shrink as market capitalization grows and volatility compresses. Plugging current parameters into that model points to a low around 31 October 2026, with a corresponding price near $44,016. Jiang cautions that the model is more reliable on timing than on the precise price target. Combining the mNAV signal with the cycle math, he frames a bottoming window spanning October to December 2026, with Bitcoin trading somewhere between $42,000 and $44,000 before any durable recovery can take hold.

The conviction also translates into a concrete trade. Jiang has proposed a long-term pair: long Strategy equity, short Bitcoin, wagering that the valuation gap between the two narrows as the discounted treasury multiple repairs faster than spot price. He has disclosed that his own short- to medium-term posture has been selling spot and shorting, and that he intends to flip to accumulating Bitcoin spot for the long side only once price enters his projected bottom zone. It is a candid admission of a bearish lean from an operator whose mining business is directly exposed to the cycle he is forecasting.

The pessimism echoes wider technical caution. Market commentary highlights that Bitcoin is testing its 200-week moving average, a level whose historical breaches have tended to usher in extended periods of weak, range-bound trading; one brokerage view pegs $55,000 as a plausible next floor should that average give way. Compounding the pressure, a more hawkish posture from the U.S. Federal Reserve has cooled the currency-debasement narrative that had simultaneously lifted gold, silver and Bitcoin, draining a key tailwind from risk assets and leaving the market more vulnerable to a deeper drawdown.

Our reading of COINOTAG's proprietary 42-indicator composite S/R scoring engine frames the near-term battle around two levels. The engine rates immediate support at $58,115 a STRONG 80/100, driven by the confluence of the Fibonacci 0.000 line, the previous-day low and the lower Donchian band, while overhead resistance at $60,996 scores 76/100 on the Ichimoku Tenkan, ATR upper and a high-volume node. With spot near $59,444 (-3.07%) and RSI at 29.97 — technically oversold — the MACD remains bearish and trend down. Derivatives data shows a long/short account ratio of 2.10 (67.7% long) against muted 0.0027% funding and $11.6B open interest, a crowded long base that, paired with a 13/100 Extreme Fear reading, leaves room for a flush. A daily close below $58,115 invalidates the bounce thesis and opens the $51,387 zone; reclaiming $60,996 is the first bullish signal.