IOSG's Jocy Sees Crypto Bear Market Bottom Near $45,000–$60,000

IOSG's Fourth Bear Market Playbook

Bitcoin's next floor sits in the $45,000–$60,000 range, timed around the end of October 2026, under the scenario IOSG Ventures founding partner Jocy presented at the Money Frontier 2026 conference in Hong Kong. The keynote opened with the question he said friends kept asking before he took the stage: whether IOSG is still investing. His answer was yes. He framed the current drawdown as his fourth bear market, one that feels closest to 2018 and 2019, when many investors no longer knew how to position. IOSG, he told the audience, has no intention of becoming “the last gatekeeper of Asian crypto VC”, and he called for more investors to back Asian builders into the next cycle. The structural news concerned allocation. The firm has lowered the share of capital committed to primary-market deals and is expanding into OTC trading, secondary markets and incubation. Jocy set that shift inside a larger thesis: crypto is turning from a trading market into internet-native financial infrastructure, built in layers. Stablecoins come first as better money on better settlement rails, tokenized real-world assets then give on-chain dollars real yield and collateral, mass-market applications follow, and AI agents become end users that need wallets, payments, identity and programmable ownership. His deal filter has narrowed to three tests: verifiable revenue, identifiable customer demand and sustainable cash flow. Quality, he argued, is mispriced when sentiment is at its worst, and the best entry prices appear only once everyone else has stepped away, a discipline that runs against FOMO-driven buying at cycle tops. He reached for a line from the Tao Te Ching, knowing the light while choosing to keep to the dark, to describe staying invested through the drawdown. He added that IOSG still runs four hours of investment-committee meetings each week, a schedule he offered as evidence the pipeline has not dried up.

Cycle Math Behind the Floor Call

The floor scenario rests on the four-year cycle. Jocy traced the recovery from the 2022 low to Bitcoin-specific catalysts: the Silicon Valley Bank collapse, spot ETF speculation that carried the price toward $60,000, and the US election that lifted it to roughly $120,000. By late 2025 he judged those catalysts fully priced in. Once the AI cycle took over, gold and AI-linked equities strengthened, conditions that should have supported Bitcoin, yet the asset stopped responding and is down 29% year to date. IOSG's internal research measured every bull phase since 2015 at roughly 1,060 days, and the model had flagged an October 2025 top, where this decline began. He added a self-reinforcement mechanism: when enough investors expect a cycle top, they de-risk together and manufacture the top they expected. Three scenarios follow: a $45,000–$60,000 floor around the end of October 2026, a deeper $40,000–$55,000 path in the first half of 2027, and other variants. The same keynote put names and numbers behind the revenue screen. He ranked the GENIUS Act, now law, with the 1975 abolition of fixed Wall Street commissions and China's 2001 WTO entry, arguing that banks can now issue dollars on-chain and that 2026 will be remembered the way 2001 is. Circle, his first case, holds about $73 billion in reserves earning close to 3.5%, roughly $2.6 billion a year, but passes about 62% of revenue to distribution partners such as Binance and Coinbase, crypto exchanges that take the largest share, leaving a 38% gross margin. Our related coverage examines whether AI models bypass Circle wallet caps. RedotPay has issued more than 5 million cards, runs about $3 billion in total payment volume and generates roughly $150 million in annualized revenue. Polymarket recorded $26.2 billion of first-quarter 2026 volume, up 90% quarter over quarter, while federally licensed Kalshi booked about $32.1 billion. On the AI side, Grass serves about 8.5 million users, with revenue set to rise from roughly $17 million in 2025 to more than $70 million in 2026. Collector Crypt's protocol revenue climbed from about $7.2 million in April to $15 million in June, and Hyperliquid routes about 97% of trading fees into token buybacks.

The $45K–$60K Band From $78,000

The keynote is the primary record here, and it states scenarios rather than a settled call. Measured against the live price, the claim has a size: our monitoring puts Bitcoin near $78,000, so the $45,000–$60,000 floor implies a further drawdown of roughly 23% to 42%, while the 2027 alternative of $40,000–$55,000 reaches almost 49% at its low end. The starting point matters as much as the target: IOSG dated this bear market to an October 2025 top, so the decline has run for about a year. The revenue-first turn is not confined to one desk; a16z Frontier's $2.2B raise points the same way. Anyone treating the band as a buy zone is underwriting that arithmetic from $78,000, not from the top.