Ki Young Ju Calls the Cycle at 3-5x

CryptoQuant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju publicly abandoned his bearish stance on Bitcoin (BTC) on September 22, 2026, predicting that the current bull cycle will deliver gains of roughly 3-5x rather than the 10x-plus parabolic runs that defined earlier post-halving eras — the cycle segments analysts have long anchored to Bitcoin's roughly four-yearly halvings of new supply issuance. Writing on X, he said he expects "3–5x rather than another 10x+ parabolic rally," to be followed by a bear phase milder than any before it, and used the thread to lay out why the old playbook no longer applies.

Reference: the September 22 post

In the September 22 post, he argues that the market itself has changed. When Bitcoin was small and retail traders set the tone, short-term hot money produced explosive rallies and 80% crashes in equal measure. Today, he contends, a far larger market and rising institutional ownership — much of it arriving through spot Bitcoin ETFs approved in the United States in January 2024 — have muted both extremes. The same forces that once capped upside, he notes, now soften drawdowns as well.

That trade-off is the point: forgoing a 10x move also means forgoing an 80% collapse, and it is precisely that steadier price behavior, in his view, that draws in long-horizon capital instead of speculative rotation. He closes on a longer arc, suggesting that if maturation continues, Bitcoin could edge closer to the vision of an asset stable enough to function as actual money moving across the internet. The call is a notable reversal for an analyst whose cautious framing shaped market debate through mid-2026, and it re-anchors the discussion in Bitcoin's on-chain structure — metrics read directly from the blockchain itself — rather than sentiment alone.

MVRV Held Above 1 Through the Dips

The reversal rests on a set of on-chain readings rather than chart patterns. The core evidence is the PnL Index, CryptoQuant's composite indicator that blends the MVRV ratio — market value divided by realized value, the aggregate price at which coins last moved on-chain — with NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss) and the long- and short-holder SOPR (Spent Output Profit Ratio) metrics to gauge how profitable holders are in aggregate.

Ki notes that this cycle's peaks have been less extreme than those of prior cycles, while its troughs have formed at comparatively healthy holder-profitability levels. Most tellingly, MVRV never dropped below 1 at any point in the current cycle: even at the lows, BTC traded above the average on-chain acquisition cost of all holders, meaning individual investors took losses but the holder base as a whole never went underwater. Earlier bear markets, by contrast, saw MVRV break below that line — which is why he treats the discipline of this cycle's drawdowns as evidence of structural maturity rather than luck.

The second pillar is momentum in the itself. The PnL Index's 365-day moving average, a series that reacts late at turning points, is forming what he describes as a meaningful inflection point, alongside improvement across several other on-chain indicators. That marks a direct retreat from his May 2026 position, when a post cited in the May thread warned that once profit-taking chains begin, investor profit-and-loss tends to decline for roughly 18 months, potentially extending a bear market into early 2027.

Reference: a post cited in the May thread

Flow signals reinforce the turn, in his assessment: rising realized market cap points to fresh capital entering the market, early-era holders — the so-called OG whales among long-dormant crypto whales — have stopped selling, and whales in the futures market built large long positions near the recent bottom. Read against the broader Bitcoin market backdrop, he concludes that the current structure favors patient capital over leverage-driven speculation.

Why a Compressed Cycle Matters

Fresh on-chain corroboration has emerged in support of Ki's call. CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost reported on September 24 that Bitcoin's short-term holder cost basis has crossed above the active long-term holder cost basis — only the fifth such crossover in Bitcoin's history — which he reads as confirmation of a bull market transition. Cost basis here is the average on-chain acquisition price of a holder cohort, with short-term holders drawn from recently moved coins and long-term holders from coins dormant for longer stretches, so the crossover signals that newer buyers, in aggregate, are carrying a higher average entry price than the market's longest-sitting active coins.

Active long-term holders are defined as long-dormant coins moved at least once in the past seven years, deliberately excluding inert supply. More than 3.5 million BTC has gone unmoved for over a decade, with that stock still growing by roughly 8,000 to 30,000 BTC a month.

Darkfost cited ETF-driven liquidity inflows as a supporting factor for the shift, but cautioned that the indicator has been wrong before and that the signal could still be invalidated, urging traders to weigh cost-basis changes alongside fund flows and any movement of long-dormant coins.

Market Context

In accompanying commentary published as of 06:59 UTC, Coinotag framed the revised cycle math around a single theme: institutionalization compressing Bitcoin's volatility in both directions. For desks sizing positions around a repeat of 2017 or 2021, the publication noted, a 3-5x base case changes the leverage calculus outright. It pointed to record Brent put bets — bearish wagers on crude oil — flagging macro risk and a White House push on Bitcoin rules as further signs of a market increasingly shaped by institutions and policy rather than retail reflex — a shift echoed, it said, even in Jamie Dimon's stance on Bitcoin, given the JPMorgan Chase chief's years of public skepticism toward the asset. By this framing, the test of the thesis is not the price target itself but whether MVRV holds its floor through the next correction.