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The crypto token has fallen more than 40% since its peak last fall, Bloomberg News reported Saturday (Feb. 21), amid the growing popularity of stablecoins and prediction markets.
The price of bitcoin hit a record high of $126,272 in October 2025. In the last month, its price has tumbled from $90,000 to a little more than $67,000 as of Sunday (Feb. 22).
The report characterizes the struggle as centering around purpose, rather than price, noting that the decline is happening amid a friendly regulatory environment in Washington and strong levels of institutional adoption.
“The central story of bitcoin was ‘number go up’ and we don’t have that anymore,” Owen Lamont, portfolio manager at Acadian Asset Management, told Bloomberg. “We have number go down. That is not a good story.”
According to the report, one of the indicators of stablecoins’ ascendency came in November, when CashApp said it would begin supporting the coins. It also points to other developments signalling a shift away from bitcoin: the passage of the GENIUS Act, and the rise of technology like tokenization and cross-border stablecoin payments, which do not rely on bitcoin to function.
“If anything, stablecoin activity could be correlated with activity on Ethereum or on other chains. And stablecoins are for payments,” said Carlos Domingo, co-founder/CEO of tokenization platform Securitize. “I don’t think anybody today sees bitcoin as a payment mechanism.”
Writing about the future of cryptocurrency in 2022, PYMNTS David Evans argued that bitcoin has no way to ensure price stability, which is necessary for a currency to have.
“A putative currency must be reasonably stable,” he wrote. “If it is subject to rapid depreciation people do not want to receive it for payments, and if subject to rapid appreciation people do not want to spend it and thereby lose their gain.”
Bitcoin, with its “hardwired, algorithmically driven, supply curve … cannot adjust supply to ensure either that the currency is relatively stable over short periods of time or that it inflates or deflates at a predictable rate,” he added.
And in examining the broader crypto economy in 2021, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster likened starting a coin to constructing a casino.
“Investing in them is like gambling, playing the slots, buying a lottery ticket, hoping to hit the jackpot,” she wrote. “Without any real understanding of what these coins do, why they are valuable or what’s the use case for any of them. Where the only fundamentals for making the investment are what other mostly amateur investors say on social media, and whether the price is up or down at the open or close.”
