Ki Young Ju Says Bitcoin (BTC) Bear Cycle Is Over, Sees 12-24 Months of Rise or Sideways Trade

Ki Young Ju Calls the Bear Cycle Over

If the cycle read is right, the next one to two years hold either renewed gains or a long consolidation band, and no return to a sustained downtrend. That is the position Ki Young Ju, chief executive of the on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant, set out on Tuesday, 2026-10-13, in a post on X. His words were direct: “The Bitcoin (BTC) bear cycle is over; expect a rise or sideways price action for 12 to 24 months.” In practical terms, the window he described stretches to October 2028 at its outer edge, spanning the period after the most recent Bitcoin halving. Ju runs one of the most closely watched on-chain data desks in crypto, the firm whose exchange-flow and holder-cohort dashboards feed a large share of the cycle models traders argue with, so the statement moved the debate over where the Bitcoin (BTC) price goes from here. In the four-year framework that frames most cycle analysis, a bear phase has historically followed the post-halving peak, which makes a declaration that the phase is finished a claim about the calendar as much as the chart. The market he is assessing has spent recent sessions compressed between $81,000 and $84,000, a band that has held while participants weigh whether the current drawdown is a correction inside a larger advance or the opening leg of a fresh decline. Ju's answer rejects the second reading outright. He did not frame the call as the start of a vertical move: the stated expectation is explicitly two-sided, a rise or a flat market, and he published no price target with it. What the post removes, in his telling, is the scenario that has hung over the tape for weeks, the idea that the market has entered a new bear phase set to grind the price lower across the year ahead.

The caveats in the same post matter as much as the headline claim. Ju attached no specific level to the outlook and stated that the assessment is not a guarantee the price rises; it is a directional judgment meant to play out over one to two years, not a single quarter. He also flagged the variables that could still bend the path: geopolitical developments, lingering uncertainty and macroeconomic data, any of which, he wrote, can produce swings in prices. That hedge is not decoration: he named no entry level, no invalidation point and no upside marker, which leaves readers with a direction and a duration and nothing else to trade against. Read against the tape, the call lands on a market that has been arguing with itself. Our earlier coverage followed the coin as it reclaimed $83,000 after the IMF lifted its global inflation forecast, and price action has since settled back into the $81,000–$84,000 band. Enthusiasm of the kind Ju describes would, in practice, need steady demand behind it: corporate treasury buyers of the sort holding 8,430 Bitcoin (BTC) on their balance sheets, as Tesla's $960 million Bitcoin position shows, reserve structures modeled on a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, crypto whale wallets adding on weakness, and long-term holders who simply HODL through drawdowns. None of those flows turned negative in his post; none were quantified in it either. The band itself has become the reference point for both camps: bulls read the repeated defenses as accumulation, bears read the rejections as distribution, and the post hands most of its ammunition to the first group.

The $81,000–$84,000 Test

However the call ages, the near-term test is already on the chart. While the price holds the $81,000–$84,000 band, neither the bull case nor the bear case has hard confirmation, and our Bitcoin technical analysis keeps those same levels in view. A sustained break below the band would falsify the bear-cycle-over claim well before 12 months pass; a decisive push above $84,000 would do the opposite. Between those thresholds, Ju's forecast and the market's own tape say the same thing in different registers: direction is undecided.