Bitcoin's price teeters near $100K, sparking double top fears. Will institutional flows provide support, or is a 75% crash on the horizon?

Bitcoin's Double Top: Is a Price Crash Inevitable?

Bitcoin is dancing near the $100,000 mark, leading some analysts to believe it may form a double top and be followed by a price crash. But are we really headed for a 75% plunge?

Double Top Trouble?

Bitcoin spent considerable time trading between $100,000 and $110,000, which some analysts, like Peter Brandt, believe indicates that the uptrend that began in January is coming to an end. The double top comprises two peaks at roughly the same price (near $110,000), with a trendline through the low point between the peaks (around $75,000 in early April). A drop below $75,000 could trigger a crash to $27,000.

Technical patterns can be self-fulfilling. Spotting a double top may cause traders to react in a way that reinforces the expected outcome.

Institutional Flows: A Bullish Shield?

The current rally is primarily driven by institutional flows, with 11 spot Bitcoin ETFs debuting on the Nasdaq in January 2024. Corporate treasury adoption is also picking up, with 141 public companies holding over 841,000 BTC.

According to Vetle Lunde, Senior Analyst at K33 Research, the flows-driven nature of this bull run makes it more resilient than previous ones. Institutions do due diligence and risk assessment before adding Bitcoin to their portfolios, which means their allocation is for the long term. According to Lunde, this trend of sticky institutional allocation is just beginning, and the resulting demand will provide price support for some time to come. Lunde also explained that these investment vehicles are sucking liquidity out of the market, and every time a new big-ticket investor hits the market with bids, this is addressing less and less supply, and the bullish impact on prices becomes more pronounced.

Halving Hype or Hot Air?

The bearish double-top crash scenario seems plausible because we are in the post-halving year, which has historically marked bull market tops. Halving is a programmed code in Bitcoin's blockchain that reduces the pace of BTC supply expansion by 50% every four years. The last halving occurred in April 2024 and reduced the per-block BTC reward to 3.125 BTC from 6.25 BTC.

The halving cycle may not unfold as expected, as sticky institutional adoption has a greater bearing on price than miners. BTC sold by miners now accounts for a tiny percentage of the average daily trading volume. The change in market leadership means the four-year halving cycle may not play out as it did before. Earlier, most BTC holders were miners, and the BTC issued per year was a huge percentage of the outstanding bitcoin supply. So, selling pressure from miners mattered greatly to the market price. Now, the BTC mined is 0.05-0.1% of the average BTC daily trading volume and halving this supply has no impact on the supply/demand balance in the market.

So, Crash or Cash?

While technical indicators might flash warning signs, the fundamental shift towards institutional adoption offers a robust counter-narrative. A black swan event, like the Terra or FTX collapse, would be required to trigger a full-blown crash. Barring that, we could see a prolonged bull cycle.

Of course, Bitcoin's price could go up, down, or sideways. After all, crypto never ceases to be interesting, right?