Senior commodity strategist at Bloomberg Intelligence Mike McGlone said bitcoin could continue to fall towards the $10,000 area and potentially below it, arguing that the cryptocurrency remains trapped in a broader macroeconomic period of deflationary pressures, overweight risk assets and what he described as a glut across the digital asset convoluted.
Speaking in interview at EllioTrades, McGlone repeated a call he first renewed when bitcoin broke above $100,000: that the market could “break off from zero” again. This time, he formulated his thesis less as a pure forecast of the cryptocurrency cycle, and more as a macroeconomic view of what will happen when speculative assets start to accumulate.
$10,000 Bitcoin Thesis
McGlone’s main argument was that bitcoin is no longer traded as a separate alternative asset. He says it has been absorbed by the same cross-asset risk regime as equities, commodities and broader liquidity conditions. “Bitcoin was one of them in 2009, and now there are 37 million cryptocurrencies,” he said. “Bitcoin was one. So limited in supply. But this space led to the rise of risky assets… Now they are leading the way down.”
He linked this view to what he sees as a post-inflation deflationary phase in which bond markets, rather than cryptocurrency markets, are likely to be the next relative winners. McGlone said the surge in energy, metals and cryptocurrency volatility hasn’t fully translated into stocks yet, but he expects that to change. Its basic case is that equity market volatility increases significantly from still low levels, triggering a deeper correction in both the equity and digital asset markets.
This in turn forms the basis of his bitcoin goal. McGlone said he does not identify $10,000 as the exact cycle low, but the most crucial long-term trading zone in the asset’s history in 2019-2020. “If you look at the highest most traded Bitcoin price since 2020 and maybe even into 2019, it is 10,000 or less and has historically hovered around 10,000,” he said. “So I assume we will get back to that level.”
The strategist was particularly outspoken about the rest of the sector. He argued that stablecoins are the only clear structural winners in crypto because they “track something physical,” namely a dollar- and Treasury-backed security. Everything else, he suggested, depends largely on speculative beliefs. He pointed to the massive growth of Tether and the broader supply of cryptocurrencies as evidence that the underlying layer of the ecosystem is driving demand for the dollar, rather than the appreciation of volatile tokens.
McGlone also said the speculative surplus in 2024 and 2025, boosted by memecoins, ETFs and post-election enthusiasm around Donald Trump, could mark a lasting high for the broader asset class. “The bottom line is that these risky assets have to prove me wrong,” he said. “Otherwise, I see us navigating a bear market in equities and a bull market characterized by volatility that is just beginning.”
EllioTrades rejected both the scale of the Bitcoin call and the notion that cryptocurrencies are effectively “dead,” arguing that Bitcoin can continue to strengthen as a downside hedge and that stablecoin-based agent trading, privacy apply cases and a class of projects that survive after being forced out of the market could support a future recovery. He also argued that while many tokens may still fall to zero, the tokens that survive in the market may follow the familiar pattern of cleansing and resurgence seen in earlier cycles.
McGlone did not rule out that the cryptocurrency would eventually find a bottom. But his message was that the market didn’t exist yet. For now, he said, bitcoin and the broader convoluted continue to behave like risky bear market assets, and until equity markets see a more significant correction and remain low for some time, gains should be viewed with caution rather than as evidence that the cycle has reversed.
At the time of publication, Bitcoin was trading at $69,890.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
