Galaxy Research, the research arm of digital assets financial services firm Galaxy Digital, believes bitcoin's bear market ended in June and that the asset has since entered an accumulation phase, according to a research alert published by the firm. "We believe now is an attractive time to buy and hold bitcoin," the report said.

At the time of the note, bitcoin traded near $80,000 — roughly 35% below its October 2025 high and 39% above its June 30 low. The price would need to rise 53% to retake its previous record. By comparison, the S&P 500 sits within 1% of the record it set on Oct. 6.

The report builds its case on four pillars: technicals, positioning, fundamentals and sentiment.

Technical Picture

Galaxy tracks bitcoin's bear markets using two weekly moving averages — trend lines computed from the average weekly closing price over a set period. According to the firm, the 200-week average has acted as a floor in every bear market, while the 50-week average has served as a ceiling.

Bitcoin lost the 50-week average in November 2025 and spent 44 weeks below it. The June low tested the 200-week average and held, with the worst weekly close coming 4.7% beneath that level. Price climbed back above the 50-week average in September, and the week ended Oct. 18 marked the fifth consecutive weekly close above the threshold.

Galaxy counted 13 such reclaims since 2011 and found the outcome hinged on how long price had previously spent below the line. The four reclaims that ended spells of 20 weeks or more were higher a year later, by between 55% and 1,497%, and none closed more than 8.4% below the reclaim level in the following 12 months. Of the nine that ended shorter spells, seven fell more than 25% within a year.

The halving cycle — the programmatic supply cuts that arrive roughly every four years — supports the same conclusion, the firm said. Prior cycles bottomed on days 777, 889 and 912 after their respective halvings; Oct. 22 marked day 916 of the current cycle. Galaxy noted that the gains that followed those lows — 87x, 19x and 7.6x — have shrunk each cycle, and it does not forecast a repeat. The current drawdown of 53% is the shallowest in bitcoin's history, the report said, and the first in which price did not fall below the network's realized cost basis, the on-chain average price paid for coins in circulation.

Positioning

Galaxy identified basis traders and macro funds as the main sellers since the top. Asset managers' net long position in CME bitcoin futures fell 57% from the week of the all-time high, according to Commodity Futures Trading Commission data cited by the firm.

Leveraged funds' net short position, which represents the futures side of the cash-and-carry trade against spot ETFs, shrank by a similar amount. The front-month basis — the spread between futures and spot prices — averaged 7.9% annualized in the 30 days before the high and 4.8% in the 30 days to Oct. 21, which the firm said no longer covers the trade's costs and risk.

Galaxy pointed to 13F filings, the quarterly U.S. regulatory disclosures that reveal institutional holdings, to identify the sellers. Millennium Management, Brevan Howard, Goldman Sachs, Capula, Farallon, D. E. Shaw, Schonfeld, Symmetry and Tudor cut their spot ETF holdings by between 29% and 100% between the September 2025 and June 2026 quarter-ends, a combined 68,000 BTC.

Because total holdings across all 2,200 filers fell by 48,000 BTC, the remaining institutions added in aggregate. Morgan Stanley's wealth management arm, Mubadala and the Abu Dhabi Investment Council were among the buyers.

Spot ETF holdings dropped 11% from peak to trough while price fell 53%, and the funds, which brought bitcoin into conventional brokerage accounts when they launched in January 2024, have added 87,000 BTC since the June low, the report said.

Fundamentals and Sentiment

Galaxy's fundamental case centers on U.S. fiscal conditions. Federal debt reached $40.44 trillion on Oct. 20, fiscal 2026 ended with a $1.99 trillion deficit, and the 10-year Treasury yield hit 5.31% on Oct. 5, its highest since 2007. A government refinancing that debt at 5% while running 6% deficits faces pressure to inflate, the firm argued. The report described AI-related borrowing, which Morgan Stanley expects to reach $570 billion this year, as a contributor to that pressure rather than a competitor for capital.

On sentiment, Galaxy compared the current environment to 2015–16 and 2018–19, when mainstream finance embraced "blockchain" and dismissed bitcoin. Both periods coincided with cycle lows. The firm said the 2026 version is "stablecoins and tokenization, not bitcoin," citing bank pilots of tokenized deposits, the Senate's failed cloture vote on the Clarity Act — a proposed market-structure law for digital assets — on Sept. 15, and Google searches for "bitcoin" at multiyear lows.

Risks to the Call

Galaxy set a tripwire for its view: a weekly below the 50-week average, about $76,540, that is not regained within a month. It also cited AI-enabled theft, including the $387.5 million Bitget exploit, while noting that none of the incidents involved the Bitcoin protocol itself.

On quantum computing, the report said 7.1 million BTC sit in outputs with exposed public keys, but that no cryptographically relevant quantum computer exists. It pointed to BIP-360's merge into the BIP repository in February — a proposal for quantum-resistant bitcoin outputs — and Galaxy's own $5 million quantum readiness commitment.

The full Galaxy research note is available here. This article was originally published on Bitcoin Magazine and written by Micah Zimmerman.