Bitcoin Price Forecast: BTC-USD Crashes Below $65K as “Trump Rally” Fades and $60K Becomes Key Line

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) – from $126,000 euphoria to a sub-$65,000 stress test

BTC-USD now – break below $65,000, half off the $126,000 peak and “Trump rally” erased

Bitcoin (BTC-USD) is trading around $66,000–$66,200, with one snapshot showing BTC-USD at $66,184.45, down about 9.3% on the session and roughly 50% below the all-time high near $126,000 reached in October 2025. The move through $65,000 this week briefly pushed price toward $63,000, the lowest level in more than a year and a clean break under the 2021 high, a zone that had acted as a long-term reference point for three years. The slide has wiped out the entire post-2024 “Trump rally” and put the current cycle firmly into correction territory rather than a simple pause after the ETF-driven surge. Over the last four months, bitcoin is down almost 50%, while some linked equities have dropped even more, confirming that this is a full-scale risk reassessment, not a minor shakeout.

Macro pressure on BTC-USD – risk-off, gold strength and fading spot ETF enthusiasm

The backdrop is a classic risk-off episode. Equities have sold off, long-duration growth and AI names have been hit by aggressive capital-expenditure plans, and money has rotated into safer assets. In that setting, BTC-USD has behaved like a high-beta macro asset, not like a defensive hedge. Cash demand has risen, gold has firmed, and spot volumes in bitcoin have thinned out at the same time that spot BTC ETFs are no longer absorbing every wave of selling. The initial flood of inflows into the new funds has cooled; the marginal buyer that helped support every dip in late 2024 and early 2025 is now far less aggressive. When ETF demand slows and macro anxiety picks up, the order book becomes one-sided, and modest sell programs can push BTC-USD lower very quickly. At the same time, comments from US officials making clear that there will be no policy backstop for crypto markets have removed any hope of a safety net. That pushes leveraged players to cut risk faster, adding to downside pressure each time volatility spikes.

Key levels for BTC-USD – $65,000 as new resistance, $60,000 line in the sand, $50,196 as deeper bear marker

Technically, the first line to watch is $65,000. That level has flipped from support into short-term resistance after the recent break. A sustained close back above, backed by real spot volume and renewed ETF inflows, would signal that forced selling is easing and that BTC-USD is building a new range rather than cascading into a full bear market. Below current prices, the key psychological zone is $60,000. That round number is tracked by both discretionary and systematic strategies; a clear break with momentum can trigger stop-loss flows and accelerate the downside. Underneath, one detailed Fibonacci framework and long-term cost-basis work flags an important test around $50,196, roughly $16,000 under the current area. That region overlaps with prior cycle cost zones and the 0.382 retracement of the broader advance, making it the point where a correction starts to look more like a renewed bear cycle. As long as BTC-USD trades between $60,000 and $65,000, the market is essentially in a tug-of-war; below $60,000, the burden of proof moves decisively to the bullish side.

JPMorgan, BTC-USD production cost at $87,000 and a $266,000 long-term benchmark

One of the most important institutional datapoints now in circulation is a long-run framework from a major global bank that focuses on bitcoin versus gold. The bank argues that the production cost for BTC-USD sits around $87,000, and that this level has historically operated as a “soft floor” for the cycle – not a hard barrier, but an area where downside tends to slow as economics for miners deteriorate and marginal supply is pulled back. With spot now well below that $87,000 cost estimate, price is trading at a discount to modeled replacement cost, which has historically aligned with crowded fear, not the end state of the cycle. On a volatility-adjusted basis, the same analysis suggests that for bitcoin to match private-sector gold holdings (roughly $8 trillion excluding central bank reserves), its market capitalization would need to rise enough to imply a BTC-USD price near $266,000. That number is not a short-term target. It is a long-run benchmark that says: if bitcoin ultimately captures a gold-like role in private portfolios on a risk-adjusted basis, the upside from current prices is still several multiples. The near term does not care about that horizon, but the existence of a calculated, institutionally accepted reference level that high is exactly why aggressive money keeps buying deep corrections instead of abandoning the asset.

VanEck’s extreme paths for BTC-USD – from $130,000 “bear case” to multimillion-dollar scenarios

If that $266,000 long-run reference is one anchor, specialized asset-management houses have drawn even more aggressive paths. One widely cited framework laid out a bear case for BTC-USD around $130,000 and a bull scenario soaring into the tens of millions per coin, with one version sketching a possible $53.4 million outcome under extremely favorable conditions. A separate, more restrained long-term exercise from the same camp has talked about roughly $2.9 million per BTC by 2050 if bitcoin gains share in global payments and reserve allocations. None of these are base cases for the current cycle. They are scenario maps built on assumptions about bitcoin handling 5–10% of global trade and central banks allocating around 2.5% of their balance sheets to BTC as a hedge against sovereign-debt risk. The relevance right now is not that price will sprint toward those numbers in the next few years – it will not – but that large, serious money is explicitly modeling long-run values many multiples above today. That long-duration demand is the reason every major crash so far has eventually attracted fresh capital once price falls far enough below those structural estimates.

Bitcoin vs gold – digital store of value narrative under real-time stress

The recent tape has also reignited the “digital gold” debate. While BTC-USD has been cut roughly in half from $126,000 to around $63,000–$66,000, the global crypto market has shed close to $2 trillion in value since early October, and ether has lost more than 30% year-to-date. Over the same window, gold has surged, as capital hunts for assets with long histories as safe havens and visible central-bank demand. That divergence – crypto down hard, gold up – does not invalidate the digital-gold thesis, but it highlights an uncomfortable reality: in acute stress, capital still prioritizes instruments with decades of crisis behavior, not a little over a decade of history. The more productive framing now is that bitcoin and gold are complementary rather than interchangeable. Gold remains the core flight-to-quality asset. BTC-USD sits in the bucket of high-volatility, high-upside macro proxies whose drawdowns are sharper but whose long-run return potential, if adoption deepens, is significantly higher. Treating them as the same thing is a mistake; sizing them appropriately as distinct exposures is how the digital-gold idea works in practice.

Volatility, liquidity and execution – why BTC-USD cracks faster on the way down

The most recent leg lower underlines how structure now drives outcomes. When BTC-USD falls quickly, liquidity thins, spreads widen, and slippage becomes a material cost. The Meyka read-through emphasizes three basic signals that matter in this environment: a close back above $65,000, renewed inflows into spot BTC products, and a cooling macro tape. Without those, rallies are likely to be short-squeezes into resistance rather than the start of a new uptrend. For allocations that insist on trading through the turmoil, the playbook is straightforward: use limit orders, avoid chasing weak intraday bounces, and route flows through venues with verifiable order-book depth. Each time price air-pockets lower, the difference between a patient scale-in strategy and a market-order scramble is the difference between absorbing volatility and compounding losses through poor fills.

Swiss BTC-USD allocation – CHF base, hedging choices and tax structure

The Swiss-specific angle in the Meyka piece is more than a niche detail; it captures how BTC-USD interacts with real-world constraints. Most major venues quote bitcoin in USD, but Swiss portfolios are CHF-denominated, so USD/CHF moves add an extra layer of volatility. Those who want pure BTC-USD exposure can opt for CHF-hedged ETPs where available, sacrificing some carry for cleaner linkage to the coin’s path. Others may deliberately accept USD fluctuations as part of diversification and compensate by sizing smaller. Access mode matters. Regulated ETPs on SIX simplify reporting and remove self-custody risk but introduce management fees and issuer risk. Direct holdings cut out product fees but demand robust operational security: hardware wallets, segregation of keys, and disciplined procedures. Switzerland’s tax treatment adds another lever. Private capital gains are generally tax-free, while crypto positions count toward wealth tax, and any staking yield is taxed as income. For a CHF-based asset allocator, that mix means small, staggered BTC-USD positions in a diversified portfolio, clear record-keeping for year-end valuation, and risk controls that ensure a sharp move from, say, $66,000 down toward $50,196 cannot derail broader financial goals.

Crypto spillover – ether, altcoins and a $2 trillion hit to market capitalization

The slide in BTC-USD is not occurring in isolation. The broader crypto complex has been hit with what is effectively a mini-crisis. Market-wide capitalization is down around $2 trillion since early October as speculative tokens have been crushed. A basket tracking 50 smaller coins has plunged around 67% from the recent high, far worse than bitcoin’s roughly 50% drawdown. Ether – the second-largest asset in the space – is off more than 30% this year, and confidence in some high-profile layer-two ecosystems has started to fray. That matters for BTC-USD because bitcoin is still the primary source of collateral and the main reference for risk in crypto. When altcoins melt down, leverage linked back to BTC is often unwound; margin calls, deleveraging and options hedging all feed back into spot bitcoin flows. The current episode has not yet reached the forced-liquidation chaos of 2022, but patterns are similar enough – sharp breaks through watched levels, grinding alt losses, and steadily rising realized volatility – that the comparison is now part of serious risk-management conversations.

Mining leverage – CleanSpark (CLSK) as a real-time read-through on BTC-USD repricing

The equity side offers a clean example of how sensitive the ecosystem is to the BTC-USD reset. CleanSpark (NASDAQ:CLSK), a bitcoin-mining and high-performance-computing company, has seen its share price collapse roughly 65% since bitcoin entered this new bear phase in October 2025, compared with bitcoin’s ~50% decline over the same four months. The stock currently trades around $8.27, far below a revised price target of $22 (cut from $27) and well under a broker target range of $14–$30. Over just the past week, the share price is down about 30.19%, and over six months it has fallen around 24.86%, despite trailing twelve-month revenue growth near 68% and a modest P/E ratio of 7.61 on a roughly $2.11 billion market capitalization. The latest quarter was weak: EPS of –$1.35 versus expectations of +$0.26, and revenue of $181.2 million against forecasts near $194.05 million. Even so, the core thesis from bullish analysts is that the market is giving CleanSpark “little to no credit” for its 13,513 BTC holdings and expansion into AI-oriented high-performance computing, including a potential 250 MW colocation deal in Sandersville, Georgia that could act as a near-term catalyst. That argument is effectively a levered directional view on BTC-USD: if bitcoin stabilizes and recovers, a miner that has already dropped 65% with a still-growing top line should have far more upside than downside from here. If bitcoin fails to hold the $60,000 and then $50,196 zones, miners like CLSK will likely remain value traps despite apparently cheap multiples and supportive “Strong Buy” consensus ratings. For price-sensitive capital, miners are now high-octane satellites, not core holdings – they amplify whatever view you already hold on BTC-USD.

Structured views on BTC-USD – AI grading, C+ score and projected path to $97,708.81

The Meyka AI framework wraps this landscape into a set of forward-looking numbers. The system assigns BTC-USD a C+ grade with a quantitative score around 58.6, placing it in the middle of the spectrum: neither a screaming bargain nor an obvious short from a factor point of view. From a price-projection standpoint, that model points to a one-month level near $71,408.39 and a 12-month value around $97,708.81. Read correctly, those numbers outline a high-volatility recovery scenario: there is room for further choppiness and possible dips toward the $60,000–$50,196 band in the short run, but probabilistic paths still skew toward BTC trading higher than today a year from now, not lower, provided the current stress resolves without structural damage such as a major exchange failure or regulatory shock. Combined with the $87,000 production-cost reference and the $266,000 long-term risk-adjusted benchmark, that AI trajectory reinforces a consistent message: near-term pain, medium-term upside, extreme long-term convexity if adoption keeps progressing.

Macro and sentiment – bear-cycle confirmation risk and echoes of 2022

From a cycle perspective, BTC-USD has now broken below a multi-year support band that held for roughly three years, including the 2021 high region. That break raises the stakes for a classic bear-cycle confirmation if price cannot reclaim and hold above that area in the coming months. Technical work comparing the current pattern with 2022 notes that while the drawdown is not yet as deep, the structure – failure at the highs, accelerating losses, testing increasingly important Fibonacci retracements – is tracking uncomfortably close. If the analog continues, the 0.382 Fibonacci region and prior cycle cost zones around $50,196 come into focus as the next logical magnet. Macro does not help. Policy headlines signal no special support for digital assets, ETF flows have softened, and traditional markets are dealing with their own issues: heavy AI capex, earnings quality questions and pockets of stress in credit. At the same time, the magnitude of forced liquidations in crypto has been modest compared with prior collapses, suggesting the system is under pressure but not yet in capitulation mode. That leaves BTC-USD in an awkward middle ground: too weak to call the uptrend intact, too resilient to call the cycle definitively over.

View on BTC-USD – tactical stance, structural bias and buy/sell/hold call

Taking the full picture into account – the drop from $126,000 to the mid-$60,000s, the erased “Trump rally,” the $2 trillion evaporation in crypto market cap, the relative strength of gold, the $87,000 production-cost handle, the $266,000 long-run benchmark, the Meyka AI path toward $97,708.81 in twelve months, the risk of a deeper test near $50,196, and the leveraged response visible in miners like CLSK – the stance needs to be split across horizons.

Short term, as long as BTC-USD trades below $65,000 and the $60,000 floor is at risk, the bias is bearish, with rallies more likely to be used to reduce exposure than to add aggressively. Medium to long term, the combination of institutional frameworks, production economics and AI-based projections still points to meaningful upside from today’s levels once the current risk-off wave exhausts itself. That mixture argues for a clear, decisive call: high-risk Buy with a structurally bullish view, implemented with cautious sizing and patience, rather than an all-in stance. In other words, BTC-USD at these levels is not comfortable, but it is far closer to the cheap end of its modeled range than the expensive end – and that is exactly where the best long-run entries tend to appear.

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