Bitcoin requires trillions of dollars to enter the market, and chip lock-up is a bottom-building game under macroeconomic pressure

According to Woofun AI, since Bitcoin hit an all-time peak of $126,000 in October 2025, the cumulative retracement rate has reached 50%, and the current price is hovering around the $63,000 level. CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju's latest findings point to the core contradiction: to replicate the past bull market, the market must welcome $1 trillion in incremental capital to enter the market; otherwise, the cliff-style decline in capital efficiency will limit growth.

This conclusion completely disrupted the market's traditional perception that Bitcoin still has room to rise tenfold, and revealed the essential structural differences between this round of decline and previous bear market pullbacks. The logic that capital drives the market has been fundamentally reversed. Relying on retail investors or small amounts of capital alone can no longer push the market out of the trending market; it is necessary to rely on the deep intervention of 100 billion institutional capital to break the impasse.

This sharp rise in the funding threshold means that if Bitcoin were to break out of the main upward wave in a straight line, the amount of capital required will far exceed any cycle in history, and the market is standing at a critical point where the growth logic needs to be re-examined. According to data compiled by Woofun AI, from the net inflow of only US$2.7 billion in 2011, which generated an astonishing increase of 55,436%, to requiring US$365 billion in incremental capital to drive a 2000% increase in the current cycle, to having achieved a market capitalization increase of 69.7 billion US dollars in the current cycle in exchange for only a 689% increase, the trajectory of the collapse of capital efficiency is clearly visible. In 2011, only $5 million of additional capital was needed to double the currency price; now, to achieve the same doubling of the market, it is estimated that it will take 101 billion dollars to enter the market in increments.

This difference in order of magnitude shows that Bitcoin is no longer the kind of asset in the early days where millions of dollars can leverage the market, but has completely transformed into a mature market that relies on 100 billion institutional capital to push the market out of the trend. Ki Young Ju's calculation conclusion is very serious: Bitcoin needs at least $1 trillion of incremental capital to enter the market if it wants to break out of the main upward wave in a straight line once again.

This means that Bitcoin can no longer rely solely on retail ETF microfinance hype; it must become a core part of the global asset allocation. Compared to the total market value of gold of 27 trillion US dollars, Bitcoin currently has a market value of only 1.3 trillion US dollars, and there is still plenty of room for theoretical growth. However, due to the sharp decline in efficiency driven by capital, the pace of this round of growth was much slower than the 2017 and 2021 bull markets, and the difficulty of replicating the previous 100x and tenfold increases sharply. Even if the scale of future entry capital hits a record high, judging from data rules, the percentage increase in the subsequent bull market will be significantly lower than in the previous cycle. CryptoQuant's latest estimates have proven that it is difficult for Bitcoin to replicate the exaggerated gains of 2017, and the market must accept the long-term reality of declining capital efficiency. The impact of supply-side structural changes on the current market even exceeds the logic of capital efficiency. The K33 Research Institute released a report on June 15 showing that the proportion of long-term holders' holdings in total circulation reached a record high of 79%.

Also, as of June 6, only 218,421 bitcoins that had been dormant for more than two years had been transferred on-chain, breaking the lowest level since the same day in 2012. Only 70,600 dormant bitcoins were moved during the same period of the year. As a comparison, 1.18 million bitcoins were sold out of cold wallets during the chip distribution phase in June 2024. On-chain data also supports this trend: the share of long-term holders' holdings has increased from 74% in the previous cycle to 78%; in recent months, about 830,000 bitcoins have been transferred from short-term transaction wallets to long-term dormant addresses. K33 analyst Vetle Lunde said that holding chips are highly concentrated, sleeping coins rarely change, and trading volume continues to shrink. This is not the emergence of a new selling force, but a typical market characteristic of the late Bitcoin bear market. The logic is very intuitive: over 80% of bitcoins have been locked up for a long time, and the floating chips that can be traded in the market have shrunk drastically.

The deep thinning of order orders makes it easier for institutions, retail investors, or incremental purchases from ETFs to quickly drive currency price fluctuations. Looking at the liquidity structure alone, market sentiment is optimistic, but it is impossible to decide whether incremental capital will enter the market as scheduled. Bitfinex, Wintermute, and Glassnode institutions have repeatedly emphasized that ETF capital inflows, stablecoin scale expansion, and institutional layout popularity have not reached levels that can support long-term reversals.

Supply-side tightening is an important condition for bottoming out, but scarce chips alone are insufficient to confirm that the market is bottoming out. According to data from CoinDesk in late June, the total number of long-term loss holders' holdings reached 5.58 million, the second-highest in history, after the sharp decline in March 2020. What is interesting is that even though a large number of long-term holders are deeply entrenched, the share of long-term holdings continues to rise, and the market also has both feelings of holding firm positions and enduring pain. The profit and loss indicator signals show that the extreme bottom range has been reached for the fourth time since 2022. CryptoQuant released a number of on-chain indicators on July 3, of which the achieved profit to loss ratio is the most critical.

The overall profit and loss ratio of Bitcoin fell to -0.35, a 43-month low. In comparison to the deep bear market after the FTX storm in 2022, the lowest price of the currency fell below $16,000. Historical data shows that after the indicator fell below -0.35, both the 2015 and 2019 bear markets ushered in a large-scale reversal of the bull market. This indicator counts the distribution of profits and losses of tokens across the network, which intuitively reflects the overall loss of the market. Negative values indicate that large-scale stop-loss selling pressure in the market has been fully released, rather than the impending risk of decline. Based on market background interpretation, Bitcoin dropped as low as $57,950 on July 1, hitting a low of 652 days; it then rebounded 7% and is currently fluctuating in the $61000-$63,000 range.

Swan Bitcoin analyst Adam Livingston pointed out that the current currency price is only 16% higher than the average price already achieved across the network; after such price differences occurred in history, the average increase in half a year was 41%, and the average annual increase was 81%. Matt Hougan, chief investment officer of Bitwise, recently wrote about the STRC preferred stock redemption crisis under MicroStrategy: in June, the stock fell below $100 in face value and fell to a minimum of $75, and the market began to question the long-term sustainability of Saylor's business model, which relies on issuing shares to stock up on coins and distribute dividends. However, Hougan believes that clearing this risk has helped the market eliminate a large number of vulnerable speculative markets, and is not a precursor to a new round of systemic risk. The market is currently undergoing repeated testing of key support levels. The four Bitcoin tests this year held support at the $60,000 mark; every time the sell-off pressure was concentrated, centralized exchanges continued to see a net inflow of about 50,000 BTC per day, reflecting the gradual exhaustion of sell-off pressure rather than actively cutting meat on a large scale.

Judging from the daily and weekly K-line patterns, the market is constructing a W-bottom reversal structure. Analyst John Bollinger said that the current price has stepped back down on the Bollinger band, and there is a small fractal bottoming pattern within the larger cycle. Once the $60,000 support is effectively broken, the next key support level falls in the already achieved price range of $53,000. This is also the core range at the bottom of the bear market that bottom capital must maintain. The macro environment suppresses the market. All changes in on-chain chips and capital are based on a bearish macro background. In June, the US spot Bitcoin ETF ushered in the worst monthly performance since listing. BlackRock's IBIT redemption scale ranked first in the industry, with a net outflow of more than 4.5 billion US dollars. K33 data showed that redemptions have slowed, but funds have not turned to net inflows.

The change of Federal Reserve chairman has brought huge policy uncertainty. The market is repricing the Fed's policy expectations with Kevin Walsh in charge of, and interest rate trends have always been a core variable affecting the short-term Bitcoin market. The US employment data for June fell short of expectations. Only 57,000 new jobs were added, far below market expectations of more than 100,000 people, and expectations of market interest rate cuts heated up slightly. The supporting infrastructure for European institutions is gradually being improved. Germany's DZ Bank has launched Bitcoin trading and escrow services in accordance with the European Union's MiCA Act, and Deka Bank also plans to cover 340 German savings banks to launch similar products. Institutional infrastructure is slowly but steadily growing on the periphery. But this is more of a demand driver than a money flow catalyst. Combining all signals, if future economic growth becomes a reality, then to achieve percentage growth equivalent to the previous cycle, the institutional capital required will far exceed the previous cycle because capital efficiency has declined.

As the concentration of long-term holders reached a record high, the amount of floating chips that can be traded in the market to absorb this capital has been drastically reduced. The massive stop-loss selling pressure in the market has largely cleared up, as the profit and loss indicator is at its lowest level in 43 months. Single data can only reflect local market characteristics. Looking at all indicators, the market already has complete bottom-building conditions, but the decisive variable — large-scale institutional incremental capital — has not yet been implemented.