Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan Says Crypto Market Bottomed in June

Hougan Calls the June Low

Bitwise chief investment officer Matt Hougan believes the crypto market has already printed the low of this cycle. In an interview taped live on Monday, Nov. 9, Hougan said, “I think we bottomed in June,” and described the market as sitting “in the early stages of a multi-year bull market.” His evidence is behavioral rather than technical: Bitcoin and the wider asset class absorbed a Democratic sweep of Congress, hot inflation readings and mounting expectations that the Federal Reserve will lift rates, without breaking down. “One definition of an early bull market is when bad news stops mattering,” he said, a test of whether the steady drumbeat of negative headlines, the noise traders file under FUD in crypto, has finally lost its pricing power. The call marks a hardening from the position he held through the summer. In June, Hougan said he had “less certainty around how, when or if” the market had bottomed, and a July 1 memo from Bitwise described the market as only “nearing the bottom.” According to Unchained, which taped the episode in front of a live audience, Galaxy's head of firmwide research Alex Thorn made a parallel case in late October on the same show, arguing that bitcoin bottomed in late June. The view carries weight beyond commentary: Bitwise is a crypto asset manager whose research memos and long-term forecasts shape how many allocators read the cycle. Hougan also mapped the one path that would break his thesis. Asked how a burst AI bubble could spill into crypto, he said only one path, “a sharp recession and no government response to it,” could send the market “below the June lows,” a combination he considers unlikely. For everyone else inclined to HODL, the message is that the floor is in.

Bitcoin Slipped Below $74,000 on Tuesday

Near term, Hougan is guarded. He is “a little bit pessimistic for the next few weeks,” citing uncertainty over how Democrats will handle crypto policy once they take control of Congress, and his base case is “maybe a few weeks of uncertainty, and then I think a good end of the year.” The market gave its answer within a day. On Tuesday, bitcoin slipped under $74,000 after October's consumer price index, the government's headline inflation gauge, printed a tenth of a percentage point hotter than forecast. Market data shows BTC trading near $73,300 at 18:08 UTC, roughly 42% below its all-time high of $126,080 set on Oct. 6, 2025, according to aggregated price trackers. Bitwise's own research puts that drawdown in context. An Oct. 28 memo from the firm wrote that bitcoin fell more than 50% from its October 2025 peak before bottoming below $59,000 in June, a slide deeper than most of this cycle's skeptics anticipated. The long-term math is far more ambitious. Bitwise's annual long-term outlook, published last month, projects bitcoin at $1.6 million by 2036: the model begins with a store-of-value market of about $31 trillion, spanning bitcoin and gold, grows it to $110 trillion within ten years, and assigns bitcoin a 34.3% compound annual growth rate as its share of that market climbs from about 5% to 25%. On air, Hougan put the expected annual return “closer to 30” percent, well above the 10% base case JPMorgan Asset Management set in October, and said he expects the debasement trade, the wager that swelling government debt undermines fiat money and lifts scarce assets, to come back “in sort of full force” in 2027. The forecast is the yardstick against which this week's $74,000 print, and the few uncertain weeks he flagged, are meant to be measured.

The gap between Hougan's cycle call and his few-weeks caution is where the tradable risk sits. The live tape, near $73,300 against a $126,080 peak, prices an asset still 42% off its high, not the $1.6 million scenario, and readers can follow the levels in our Bitcoin technical analysis. Positioning is already defensive: top perpetual traders have cut their long share to 10.1% on four exchanges, 2026 has so far brought a 16% decline against US stocks, and the latest weekly bull score of 20 underlines the same caution, with activity in contract trading skewed defensive. If bad news keeps failing to move price, the June low holds; if Hougan's recession scenario arrives, the $59,000 floor becomes the next test.