Will Bitcoin fall back to $10,000? Bloomberg experts give the most pessimistic forecast.

Author: Bitpush

The crypto market failed to see a recovery in sentiment over the past weekend. After several days of narrow-range trading, Bitcoin came under significant pressure from Sunday evening to Monday's US stock market session, falling below the $90,000 mark and briefly dipping to around $86,000. ETH fell 3.4% to $2,980; BNB fell 2.1%; XRP fell 4%; and SOL fell 1.5%, retreating to around $126. Among the top ten cryptocurrencies by market capitalization, only TRX recorded a slight increase of less than 1%, while the rest were in a correction phase.

From a time perspective, this is not an isolated correction. Since hitting its all-time high in mid-October, Bitcoin has retraced by more than 30%, and each rebound has been brief and hesitant. While there hasn't been a systemic outflow of funds from ETFs, marginal inflows have slowed significantly, making it difficult to provide the "emotional foundation" the market had previously. The crypto market is transitioning from one-sided optimism to a more complex and patience-testing phase.

Against this backdrop, Mike McGlone, senior commodities strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence, released a new report placing Bitcoin's current trajectory within a broader macroeconomic and cyclical framework. He also made a highly unsettling prediction: Bitcoin could very well return to $10,000 by 2026. This is not an exaggeration, but rather one of the potential outcomes of a particular "deflationary" cycle.

This viewpoint has sparked huge controversy not only because the figure itself is "too low," but because McGlone does not regard Bitcoin as an independent crypto asset, but rather re-examines it within the long-term coordinate system of "global risk assets - liquidity - wealth return."

"Deflation after inflation"? McGlone's focus isn't on crypto, but rather on cyclical turning points.

To understand McGlone's judgment, the key lies not in how he views the crypto industry, but in how he understands the macro environment for the next stage.

In his latest analysis, McGlone repeatedly emphasizes the concept of the Inflation/Deflation Inflection. He believes the global market is nearing such a critical juncture. As inflation peaks and growth momentum slows in major economies, asset pricing logic is shifting from "fighting inflation" to addressing "post-inflation deflation"—the phase of a comprehensive price decline after the inflation cycle ends. He writes, "Bitcoin's decline may mirror the situation in 2007 when the stock market faced the Fed's policies."

This is not the first time he has issued a bearish warning. Back in November of last year, he predicted that Bitcoin would fall to the $50,000 mark.

He pointed out that by around 2026, commodity prices may fluctuate around a key central axis—the "inflation-deflation dividing line" for core commodities such as natural gas, corn, and copper may fall around $5. Among these commodities, only copper, an asset supported by real industrial demand, is likely to remain above this central axis by the end of 2025.

McGlone points out that when liquidity recedes, the market will re-distinguish between "real demand" and "financialization premium." In his framework, Bitcoin is not "digital gold," but an asset highly correlated with risk appetite and speculative cycles. When the inflation narrative fades and macro liquidity tightens, Bitcoin tends to reflect this change earlier and more dramatically.

McGlone believes his logic is not based on a single technology but on the superposition of three long-term paths.

First, there's the mean reversion following extreme wealth creation. McGlone has long emphasized that Bitcoin is one of the most extreme wealth amplifiers in the global loose monetary environment of the past decade. When asset price growth consistently far exceeds the growth of the real economy and cash flow, the reversion is often not gentle, but dramatic. Historically, whether it was the US stock market in 1929 or the tech bubble in 2000, the commonality at the top was that the market repeatedly searched for a "new paradigm" at high levels, and the final correction, in hindsight, often far exceeded even the most pessimistic expectations at the time.

Secondly, there's the relative pricing relationship between Bitcoin and gold. McGlone specifically emphasizes the Bitcoin/gold ratio. This ratio was around 10 at the end of 2022, then expanded rapidly driven by the bull market, reaching over 30 in 2025. However, this year, the ratio has fallen by about 40%, dropping to around 21. In his view, if deflationary pressures persist and gold remains strong due to safe-haven demand, then a further return of the ratio to its historical range is not an aggressive assumption.

Third, there is the systemic problem of the supply environment for speculative assets. Although Bitcoin itself has a clear total supply limit, McGlone has repeatedly pointed out that what the market is really trading is not Bitcoin's "uniqueness," but the risk premium of the entire crypto ecosystem. When millions of tokens, projects, and narratives compete for the same risk budget, the entire sector is often uniformly discounted during a deflationary cycle, and Bitcoin can hardly completely escape this revaluation process.

It's important to note that Mike McGlone is not a proponent of bullish or bearish sentiment in the crypto market. As a senior commodities strategist at Bloomberg, he has long studied the cyclical relationships between crude oil, precious metals, agricultural products, interest rates, and risk assets. His predictions are not always perfectly timed, but their value lies in the fact that he often raises structurally contrarian questions when market sentiment is most aligned.

In his latest statement, he also proactively reviewed his "mistakes," including underestimating the time it would take for gold to break through $2,000 and misjudging the pace of US Treasury yields and the US stock market. However, in his view, these deviations repeatedly confirm one point: the market is most prone to misperceptions about trends before cyclical turning points.

Other voices: The divide is widening

Of course, McGlone's assessment is not the market consensus. In fact, mainstream institutions show a clear divergence in their opinions.

Traditional financial institutions such as Standard Chartered have recently significantly lowered their medium- to long-term target prices for Bitcoin, reducing their 2025 forecast from $200,000 to approximately $100,000, while also adjusting their 2026 projections from $300,000 to approximately $150,000. In other words, these institutions no longer assume that ETFs and corporate allocations will continue to provide marginal buying at any price range.

Glassnode's research indicates that Bitcoin's current trading range of $80,000 to $90,000 has triggered market pressure, comparable to the pressure seen at the end of January 2022. The current relative unrealized losses are approaching 10% of the market capitalization. Analysts further explain that this market dynamic reflects a state of "limited liquidity and sensitivity to macroeconomic shocks," but it has not yet reached the level of a typical bear market sell-off (panic selling).

10x Research, which focuses more on quantitative and structural research, offers a more direct conclusion: they believe that Bitcoin has entered the early stages of a bear market, with on-chain indicators, fund flows, and market structure all showing that the downward cycle has not yet come to an end.

From a broader perspective, the current uncertainty surrounding Bitcoin is no longer a problem specific to the crypto market itself, but is firmly embedded within the global macroeconomic cycle. The coming week is considered by many strategists to be the most crucial macroeconomic window of the year – the European Central Bank, the Bank of England, and the Bank of Japan will successively announce their interest rate decisions, while the US will see a series of delayed employment and inflation data, which will provide the market with a belated "real-world test."

The Federal Reserve sent unusual signals at its December 10th policy meeting: not only did it cut interest rates by 25 basis points, but it also received three dissenting votes, a rare occurrence. Powell even stated bluntly that job growth in previous months might have been overestimated. This week's flurry of macroeconomic data will reshape the market's core expectations for 2026 – whether the Fed can continue cutting rates or will have to pause for an extended period. For risk assets, this answer may be more important than any debate between bulls and bears on any single asset.