Bitcoin has slipped below the $80,000 line, but Markus Thielen, founder of the digital-asset research firm 10x Research, expects the asset to recover to $90,000 by the end of the year — even if the path there includes a short-term slide into the $70,000s. In comments made on Thursday, Thielen framed the current correction as a timing problem rather than a break in the broader trend. In spot trading early on Friday, Bitcoin ($BTC) changed hands in the $79,000 range, roughly 14% below his year-end target, with the live spot price down 4.7% over the past 24 hours.

A Rebound Thesis Built on Treasury Strain

The rebound case rests less on crypto-specific momentum than on structural strain in the United States Treasury market. Government debt is expanding at about 8% a year while long-term Treasuries — the bonds issued by the US government — pay only 4-5% in yield, and Thielen argues that this combination weakens the case for holding bonds as the debt pile compounds and inflation erodes the currency's purchasing power. Should investors grow doubtful about Washington's fiscal health, capital can rotate out of Treasuries and into scarce assets — a flow that would land squarely in the Bitcoin market.

The numbers behind the argument are substantial. The US national debt is approaching $40 trillion, and roughly $8 trillion sits in money market funds, the cash vehicles that park short-term deposits at low risk. In Thielen's reading, only part of that pool would need to shift into risk or alternative assets for meaningful buying demand to reach Bitcoin.

Technicals Echo the Early 2023 Bull Market

Chart behavior supplies a second pillar. The weekly relative strength index, a momentum gauge that scores recent closes between 0 and 100, has been improving while the coin prints progressively higher lows — a structure Thielen compares with the early stage of the 2023 bull market. Institutional participation has also compressed annualized volatility from the 60-80% of earlier cycles to about 30%, which is why he expects the next advance to arrive as sharp gains followed by long sideways stretches rather than a continuous melt-up.

Why Higher Yields Cut Both Ways

Rising Treasury yields do not automatically work in Bitcoin's favor, and Thielen is explicit about the fork. A bond selloff driven by distrust of the government's finances would push investors toward alternatives and favor the coin. A rise driven by expectations that the Federal Reserve (Fed) will tighten further to contain inflation would drain risk appetite across markets and pull Bitcoin down with everything else. On this framing, the year-end target stands or falls with the path of US yields and the Fed's monetary policy.

His cross-asset call follows the same store-of-value logic. He gives Bitcoin better odds of outperforming Ethereum, arguing that growing use of layer-2 networks, secondary protocols built atop a base blockchain to handle transactions off the main chain, spreads transaction-fee revenue away from Ethereum's base chain, while Bitcoin's scarcity — reinforced by the halving schedule that periodically cuts new issuance — keeps its investment case comparatively clean. The reasoning has roots in Bitcoin maximalism, the view that Bitcoin's fixed supply and security make it the only credible long-term store of value in crypto. On competing assets, he is equally unmoved by the bear case: concerns that planned initial public offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic would soak up liquidity from digital assets are overstated, in his view, because large technology listings can broaden demand for growth assets overall.

A Binary Setup After a Weak Month

The forecast arrives at the end of a difficult month. October's 3.8% decline left Bitcoin set for its first bearish monthly close in four months, and Friday's session saw a slide to $78,800 that gave back Thursday's US GDP beat, in which the gross domestic product reading came in above economists' expectations. With the coin now pressed below $80,000, the roughly 14% climb to Thielen's target is not much wider than the drop to his downside scenario — underscoring how binary the setup has become.

Fed Policy vs. Fiscal Distrust

The gap inside Thielen's own forecast — a dip into the $70,000 range on one side and $90,000 on the other — turns on a single assumption: what rising US yields actually mean. If the move reflects fiscal distrust, Bitcoin behaves as the alternative asset and rallies. If it reflects Fed tightening, it behaves as a risk asset and falls. Positioning offers no verdict yet, with futures open interest — the total value of outstanding futures positions that have not yet been closed — at $54.78 billion, up 1.46% in 24 hours. Investors prepared to hold through the sideways phases Thielen expects are, in effect, betting on the first scenario — and the next move in yields will tell which one is right. For readers tracking the call, the checkpoints are the ones already on the board: the direction of long-term Treasury yields, whether the weekly RSI keeps improving alongside higher lows, and how positioning evolves from current levels.