Bitcoin top $70K or $210K? Analysts, price models clash over BTC cycle peak

Veteran trader Peter Brandt sparked debate after suggesting BTC may have already hit its peak this cycle, but even he didn’t put much stock in the theory.

There’s a very slight chance that Bitcoin (BTC) has already reached its peak this cycle at the $70,000 mark, at least, based on the “exponential decay” pattern floated by veteran trader Peter Brandt.

Of course, many other price models and predictors suggest the cryptocurrency is still far from its cycle peak — and could instead top out at the $210,000 mark before the end of the bull run.

On April 27, veteran trader and analyst Peter Brandt posted a theory suggesting that Bitcoin’s bull market cycles have exhibited an “exponential decay” pattern.

This occurs when each successive cycle has a peak price that is only around 20% of the previous cycle’s peak gain. The data shows that this has occurred in the previous three market cycles.

“Worded another way, 80% of the exponential energy of each successful bull market cycle has been lost,” said Brandt.

Based on this decay rate, Brandt estimated the current cycle would only see a 4.5x gain from the low of around $15,500. Thus, the cycle top has been projected to be around $70,000 — a level it already reached in March when prices topped $73,000.

However, Brandt wasn’t fully convinced by this theory, assigning a 25% probability that BTC has already peaked this cycle.

Others argue that alternate models also blow this theory out of the water.

On April 29, CEO and Director of Research at Quantonomy, Giovanni Santostasi, rebutted the exponential decay theory with one of his own based on long-term power law behavior.

Commenting on Brandt’s theory, he said “We have only 3 data points if we exclude the pre-halving period and actually only 2 data points if we consider the ratios,” before adding “This is hardly enough data to do any significant statistical analysis.”

Santostasi measured the percentage deviation of price peaks from the long-term power law trend, extrapolating a different exponential decay pattern.

A power law is a functional relationship where one quantity varies as a power of another quantity, in this case, BTC price over time.

Related: How high can Bitcoin go? New BTC price prediction sees cycle top at $180K

Using the figures extrapolated from the genesis block, this price model predicts a fourth cycle peak around December 2025 of around $210,000. The predicted bottom for the next cycle is around $83,000, based on historical observations, he said.

The analysis combines the power law trend, four-year halving cycles, exponentially decaying peak heights, and other factors into an integrated model for Bitcoin price predictions.

Many more have made predictions on the Bitcoin peak this cycle. Swyftx lead analyst Pav Hundal told Cointelegraph that Bitcoin would at least double by the next halving in 2028, estimating a price of around $120,000.

Meanwhile, CEO of Acheron Trading and quantitative trading strategies expert, Laurent Benayoun, anticipates a potential cycle top of $180,000.

Fidelity Digital Assets revised its medium-term outlook for Bitcoin on April 22, stating that it is “no longer cheap.”

At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $62,528, down 15% from its all-time high in mid-March, according to CoinGecko.