Bitcoin models indicate a 70% chance of a major breakout in 2026, but only if this trend persists.

On a cold “Betwixmas” morning in December, the atmosphere surrounding Bitcoin feels both nostalgic and strange.

The story is familiar, as it still oscillates between euphoria and anxiety. Oddly enough, there's a different crowd of people looking at the charts now.

There are veterans who lived through 2017 and 2021, there are newcomers who got exposure through brokerage accounts and ETF tickers, and there are investors who never had to learn what a seed phrase is.

Bitcoin is trading at around $89,000. This number would have seemed ridiculous a few years ago, but if you zoom out, it still holds true. But it also feels like the market has collapsed, having survived a peak around $126,000 and subsequent decline just a few weeks ago.

This decline is due in part to rising U.S. Treasury yields, tariffs, and ETF outflows, a reminder that Bitcoin is now breathing the same air as other global risk markets.

This sets the real point for 2026.

If Bitcoin hits a new all-time high next year, after already hitting a new all-time high in 2025, it will change the emotional rhythm that people have built around expectations.

Traders call this a four-year cycle: a halving occurs, supply dwindles, followed by a big rally and then a hangover. Everyone has their own version, but the timing pattern works like a metronome.

The all-time high in 2026 will be more than just another green candle. That would be a signal that the metronome has lost its power and something else is keeping time.

The story of the old cycle and why 2026 is a stress test

The idea of ​​a “four-year cycle” is built on a clear premise. Each halving reduces new supply, tightens the market, causes prices to fall, and then the cycle dries up, eliminating leverage and excess through significant drawdowns.

Historically, the most significant peak has often occurred approximately 1 to 1.5 years after the half-life. In classic terms, the halving is the battle, the rise is the fire, and the fire burns out in the second year.

The year 2026 is important because it is on the opposite side of the lunar calendar. The most recent halving occurred in 2024. The market had already hit new highs before the halving in a way that caught many people off guard, but then hit new highs again in 2025. If Bitcoin continues to make more meaningful highs in 2026, it will start to look more like a longer macro cycle with corrections along the way than a clean four-year pulse.

This distinction is important for those looking to write their next chapter, and it's also important for those whose lives are tied to these movements, retailers who time bull markets, founders who time funding windows, miners who live and die by their margins, and institutions who must account for their exposures in quarterly letters.

A simple bar to clear and the required calculation results

Bitcoin will need to break past its all-time high near $126,000. This is an increase of about 42% from the current price of about $89,000.

This is not monthly by Bitcoin standards, nor is it free. In easy-to-understand compounding terms, the market would need an average of about 3% per month to get there by the end of 2026, and closer to 6% per month to get there by mid-year.

Real markets don't move on smooth lines, but math is helpful because you can see what the hills are like before you start arguing about the weather.

Asking what needs to happen for that rise to be plausible ultimately comes down to three forces that have become harder to ignore over the past two years.

Fees, flow, and access.

• FeeThe market has already shown that rising real yields can punish Bitcoin, so non-yielding assets will have to fight for attention when investors can be rewarded for holding cash.
• flowThis is because ETFs and ETPs have turned Bitcoin into something that can be bought and sold at a certain size without touching a crypto exchange, meaning that a week of institutional risk-off behavior can be important.
• accessBecause the next wave of demand will be around distribution, platforms, compliance rails, and whether people can use Bitcoin with one click within the systems they already use.

These three elements are also the easiest way to talk about cycle breaks without making them astrological.

The story of supply and demand that actually drives prices

After the 2024 halving, the network will create approximately 450 new Bitcoins per day. At about $89,000 per coin, that equates to about $40 million in new supply per day, or about $15 billion per year at current prices.

This is not a perfect proxy for selling pressure. Miners do not sell all their coins, and long-term holders and exchanges add their own dynamics. Still, it serves as a behind-the-scenes reality check.

If the market wants higher prices, someone has to absorb the supply, and that absorption has to be persistent enough to matter. Here, the ETF era becomes the core of the discussion for 2026.

Citi's 2026 forecast includes a target price of about $143,000 and a rough estimate of about $15 billion in ETF inflows. Whether you agree with this goal or not, its flow numbers are of the same order of magnitude as the annual issuance amount after the halving, making it a useful way to frame the year.

If ETFs, corporations, and other allocators collectively generate net new demand that equals or exceeds the flow of new supply over an extended period of time, then a new all-time high without the need for retail mania becomes a plausible outcome. If flows stall or reverse, Bitcoin will have to fight both gravity and its own reflexes to rise, and the odds will change.

CoinShares data shows that the ETP market is already large enough to leave its fingerprints. After another strong week of inflows, the annual total for 2025 still looks large in absolute terms, and the AUM drawdown shows how quickly risk appetite can change.

2026 will therefore be less about whether Bitcoin's code continues to do what it always has been, and more about whether the people and institutions surrounding Bitcoin continue to choose to hold, add to, and distribute Bitcoin.

Interest rate system to stop punishing Bitcoin

Imagine an investor who used to scoff at Bitcoin, but quietly bought exposure through ETFs when it became administratively easier.

The person usually does not think about the halving cycle. They're thinking about opportunity costs, correlations, and what their portfolio is getting paid to do while they wait.

Real yields are a major part of the story for the second half of 2025, and the narrative around price declines after the October peak was tilted toward rising U.S. Treasury yields in parallel with ETF outflows. In that world, Bitcoin trades like a high-beta asset and is treated as an option when safer alternatives are profitable.

For Bitcoin to reach new all-time highs in 2026, we would typically expect at least one of two things to change.

Either real yields stop rising and begin to ease, making it easier to own non-yielding assets, or demand for Bitcoin becomes strong enough to ignore high yields.

The first path is a cleaner path, with more traditional macro settings for risk assets and alternative stores of value. The second path feels very much like regime change, and it will likely require larger and broader access, more durable institutional accumulation, and a market that has absorbed the ETF structure into its normal functioning.

Access as a silent catalyst

The most underappreciated thing over the past two years is how much the purchasing process has changed.

Bitcoin used to require friction. I had to sign up somewhere, learn a new interface, and accept a kind of personal responsibility that most investors don't want. This friction acted as both a demand limit and a safety barrier.

This reduces friction. ETFs have made it easier to buy, and the next step is for brokerages and banks to go further, which is exactly what some on Wall Street are exploring, Reuters reports. If spot trading of cryptocurrencies becomes part of mainstream securities trading platforms, the number of potential marginal buyers will once again expand, including those who would never open a crypto exchange account.

This is important in 2026 because access can reshape demand.

Retail mania tends to explode, there will be floods, and then there will be droughts. Assigning through familiar financial plumbing can be time-consuming, stickier, and more tedious. This also translates to the trend being extended and timing expectations potentially becoming longer.

Cycle breaks don't have to look like fireworks, they can look like predicaments.

In plain language, the validity model

This is the part most cycle arguments skip over: probability.

We can model the likelihood of Bitcoin reaching an all-time high using a simple approach that traders and risk managers have used for decades: a stochastic process in which the price moves up or down based on volatility and the expected return environment.

You can and should debate the assumptions, but it gives you a disciplined way to discuss the results.

Using the current price near $89,000, the all-time high barrier of $126,000, and an annualized volatility estimate of approximately 41 percent from the CF benchmark BVX, we can apply a drift assumption based on real-world expectations, and Citi's 2026 target of $143,000 implies positive drift consistent with its year-end level.

Using these inputs, the model gives a roughly 70% chance that Bitcoin will hit at least one new all-time high in 2026.

This is a conditional statement, and it says something important.

With volatility this high, Bitcoin doesn't need a perfect upward path to hit new highs, it just needs enough positive drift to bias random swings in its favor.

We can then expand our horizon to the estimated 2028 half-life. Under the same drift assumption, the probability that Bitcoin fails to hit a new all-time high at any point before the 2028 halving drops to single digits.

Assuming a more conservative path, one in which strong momentum continues in 2026, then cools and consolidates in 2027 and early 2028, the probability of failure increases to the mid-10 in 10.

The outcome of “no new highs before the next halving” is possible, and if 2027 becomes the year of risk-off consumption, the probability will increase significantly. The market's base case remains tilted towards further highs through 2028 under optimistic drift assumptions.

So what needs to happen in 2026 for this cycle to feel broken?

Stripping away the jargon and making it grounded, the conditions look like this:

1. The flow regime needs to become supportive again. Net inflows through ETFs and other ETPs continue, and after a period of outflows, confidence returns and is stable enough to offset new supply and re-attract capital that has been on the sidelines.
2. The macro background needs to stop acting like an anchor. Ideally, real yields stabilize or decline and market demand for risk assets returns in a way that supports high beta exposures.
3. Access must continue to expand. Broker platforms, banks, and the broader distribution base are important because they expand the buyer base without requiring a cultural shift. This is often a boring infrastructure story and a story that changes the market structure.
4. Regulations need to be made clearer. The US stablecoin framework and Europe's MiCA era both aim for a world where cryptocurrencies operate within clearer rules. Transparency can scare some into action, and it can also unlock a larger pool of capital waiting for rules that make it bearable. In 2026, unlocking it will be more important than slogans.
5. The Bitcoin scarcity story reaches a new milestone. The approach of mining 20 million coins attracted attention as a psychological marker in a market that is always looking for symbols. In previous cycles, the symbol was the halving date. In more mature cycles, milestones can pile up and the story becomes a long arc rather than a single calendar event.

Add this all together, and a 2026 all-time high no longer sounds like a magical burst of destiny. It starts to sound like an extension of the structural changes that began when the market moved to traditional financial wrappers in response to on-chain demand.

What to expect for the 2028 halving

If Bitcoin breaks out again in 2026, the next phase will be more interesting.

In the old cycle scenario, 2027 would be the year when the air goes out, the markets bleed, and everyone waits like a scheduled sunrise for the next halving.

Breaking the cycle changes the emotional pace.

It changes the context. The fix is ​​not the end of an era, but something manageable within a larger trend.

If 2026 hits a meaningful new high, a reasonable expectation is that 2027 will be a year of consolidation rather than a complete reset. Volatility may be compressed as the buyer base becomes more organized, and the market begins to behave more like a macro asset with crypto-specific catalysts than an independent casino.

The 2028 halving then becomes less of a sudden shock and more of a committee event, a date that asset allocators can plan for and frame the story as a gradual tightening of supply to a growing access group.

This type of market can still rise after the halving, and it can still fall sharply. The difference is that the driver is no longer just a ritual on the bike. It's the interaction of liquidity, flows and risk appetite.

And in 2029, the story will reach maturity.

Take one step further down that path, and 2029 starts to look like the year Bitcoin's biggest question becomes its identity.

In a world of mainstream access and clearer regulation, Bitcoin needs to prove what role it will play when the novelty wears off. Especially as sovereign signaling continues to evolve, some will continue to treat it like digital gold, others like a leveraged bet on liquidity, and still others like a strategic reserve asset.

What is important here is the “human interest'' part.

The most important change is not that the chart breaks a pattern, but that people holding Bitcoin may no longer share the same time horizon or the same reasons for owning Bitcoin.

Retailers checking prices on their phones while commuting, miners monitoring margins, founders building companies, portfolio managers trying to justify their exposure to committees, they can all pull into the market in different ways, smoothing out old extremes while leaving plenty of room for drama.

A record high in 2026 will make headlines. The deeper story is about slowly replacing the folklore cycle with a more mature and complex engine.

If the market wants that outcome, 2026 is the year it must get it through entrenched flows, uncontested macro context, and ever-expanding access. As such, Bitcoin's next peak will feel less like a once-every-four-year event and more like part of a longer, thornier march toward the mainstream.