Bitcoin may already be two months into a bear market, based on certain indicators such as the one-year moving average, according to CryptoQuant’s head of research.
Speaking on Thursday’s episode of the Milk Road show, CryptoQuant’s Julio Moreno said that most of the metrics he uses for the Bull Score Index turned bearish in early November and have yet to show signs of recovery.
The index assesses market conditions using factors including network activity, investor profitability, Bitcoin demand, and liquidity, and is scored on a scale from 0 to 100.
“For me the last confirmation, it’s a technical indicator, which is the price going below its one-year moving average, that’s the technical indicator that I would say confirms this.”
A one-year moving average reflects an asset’s average price over the past 12 months and is commonly used to identify long-term market trends.
Bitcoin began 2025 at roughly $93,000 and climbed to a peak of $126,080 in October, before finishing the year below its starting level, according to data from crypto aggregator CoinGecko.
If Bitcoin is indeed in a bear market, this would contradict many analyst forecasts that had projected 2026 as a year of renewed growth for the asset.
Historically, crypto bear markets have been marked by steep sector-wide drawdowns and often require years for prices to recover.
Bitcoin is currently trading at around $88,543 as of Friday. Moreno, however, expects the market to find a bottom between $56,000 and $60,000 over the next year, based on Bitcoin’s realized price and historical market behavior.
Moreno explained that in past bear markets, Bitcoin’s price has typically fallen toward its realized price — the average price at which current holders acquired their coins.
“In bull markets, the price tends to deviate significantly above the realized price,” he said. “When a bear market sets in, that realized price becomes a reasonable baseline for where the market could bottom.”
A decline from Bitcoin’s all-time high to around $56,000 would amount to an approximate 55% drawdown. Moreno noted that this would be relatively mild compared with previous bear markets, which have seen losses of 70% to 80%.
“If you look at it positively, the drawdown from the all-time high isn’t as severe as what we’ve experienced in the past,” he said. “This time, it would be closer to a 55% decline.”
Moreno also suggested that the current bear market appears more stable, largely due to the absence of major crypto-related collapses. By contrast, the 2022 downturn was marked by the collapse of the Terra ecosystem in May, followed by failures at Celsius Network in June and FTX in November, events that rattled the entire industry.
In addition, he pointed to ongoing accumulation by large institutional investors, a broader base of traders and investors ready to enter the market, and the presence of more established and reliable companies and projects across the crypto sector.
“Talking about demand again, there are other types of players now that buy more periodically. In previous bear markets, the demand was basically, you know contracting. I would say that structurally, we now have more like institutional or ETFs that don’t sell, and also there’s some buying there.”
