Bitcoin could bottom out soon as a 2026 recession or stock market crash looks like an outlier scenario
My core thinking about the Bitcoin market has remained unchanged since September of last year, before it hit all-time highs in October.
I articulated this in my medium-term $49,000 Bitcoin bearish thesis published on November 24, 2025, and revisited on January 30, 2026.
Neither part of the argument changed.
Bitcoin still trades in cycles, and true “now is the low” moments tend to arrive when minor economics and institutional currents align, and the final bottom print usually feels mechanical rather than emotional.
Since then, discussions about 2026 have drifted into familiar territory, with people (especially on social media) continuing to link Bitcoin’s next move to an impending global recession or a stock market crash that will force everyone to liquidate.
I can see why the story is so fascinating. It’s clean, cinematic, and gives everyone a single responsibility.
It also no longer feels like a base case.
If you look at the big macro forecasts, the word deceleration is used instead of the word collapse.
The IMF predicts global growth in 2026 to be 3.3%. The World Bank sees global growth slowing to 2.6% in 2026 and sees the world as resilient despite the noise of trade tensions. The OECD predicts that global GDP growth will slow to 2.9% in 2026.
Then create a crowdsourced version of the same idea.
In polymarkets, the probability that the U.S. will enter a recession by the end of 2026 remains in the low 20s, essentially telling the market that recession risk is real, but that is not the central forecast.
Work is the first place where the story is really tested because it is how ordinary people experience the economy. Here, the data turns into a real warning light, also reminding you that slowdowns and collisions are in different lanes.
The revised BLS benchmark shows that total nonfarm employment growth in 2025 will decrease from 584,000 to 181,000. These kinds of revisions change the tone of the entire macro discussion, and are consistent with what many felt by 2025 would be slower hiring, harder job transitions, and less momentum for many white-collar jobs.
According to the same BLS announcement, the unemployment rate in January 2026 was 4.3%, and the number of employed people increased by 130,000 in the same month due to increases from health care and social assistance. This is at the same time that the labor market is cooling down, and at the same time it is continuing to move, which helps explain why stock prices keep rising while people are discussing the recession at the dinner table.
The gap between how the system feels and how the index trades is why I continue to separate the mechanics of the Bitcoin cycle from the global story of doom. A recession is still a possibility in 2026, but the market continues to treat it as a minority outcome.
This macro framework is important for Bitcoin. Because that means it doesn’t take a global fire to start the next big drawdown. It becomes a localized fire, leverage is flushed, miners are forced to sell mechanically, ETF flows continue to leak, and the market may print levels that change the nature of the buyer base.
With Bitcoin already down to the low $60,000s and stocks continuing to hit new highs, that disconnect is the whole story. Although the graph looks like a typical cooling phase, the interior has been experiencing a wintry atmosphere for several weeks.
So when I say that a 2026 recession, or stock market crash, feels like an outlier scenario, I mean that the base scenario has changed. The world appears capable of absorbing friction, even if it remains politically turbulent.
This makes Bitcoin easy to set up, but Bitcoin’s unique mechanics allow it to print cycle floors.
Work is a macro stress test, and the test points out the pain.
If you want a graph that explains why there’s so much talk of a recession, it’s a series of job additions or losses every year since 2000.
The contraction of the pandemic has settled like a crater, and the year of rebound looms above all, making 2025 seem small by comparison. The BLS’s revised estimate of just 181,000 jobs added in 2025 is a number that gets people’s attention.
A practical point is the shape of the deceleration. According to the same BLS report, job growth in January 2026 was particularly concentrated in essential services, health care, and social assistance.
Federal salaries also continue to decline, with the report noting that they have fallen significantly from their peak in October 2024. In such a labor market, while the overall unemployment rate is relatively stable, there is a possibility that it may feel rough on the job.
Weaker employment raises recession risks and increases the likelihood of policy easing, pushing real yields lower as the year progresses. In Polymarket’s year-end 2026 interest rate market, traders are concentrated in the lower to middle thirds of Polymarket, consistent with the idea that an economic slowdown will eventually drive interest rates lower.
This is the core of Bitcoin. Employment could push policymakers toward easier conditions, and easier conditions could arrive without a global crash. Cryptocurrencies operate on reflexes, leverage, and plumbing, so even slow grinds create stress inside cryptocurrencies.
Debt and corporate failure scream loudly
There is another macro picture that is important here. It’s just below GDP forecasts and stock charts.
The number of corporate bankruptcies is on the rise, and the numbers are large enough to change the way the cycle feels, even as major economies continue to move forward. The number of eligible U.S. corporate bankruptcy filings in 2025 will reach 785, the highest annual total since 2010, with 72 filings in December alone, according to S&P data.
The monthly outlook was simple: refinancing became difficult, interest expenses remained high, and one by one, the weakest balance sheets began to crumble. Market Intelligence also showed that the number of applications for the first half of 2025 reached its highest level since 2010, with the pace already heating up by mid-year.
On the household side, the stress is even easier to imagine, as it manifests itself in checkout lines. The New York Fed reported that total household debt reached $18.8 trillion in the fourth quarter of 2025, an increase of $191 billion in the quarter, and credit card balances reached $1.28 trillion.
Credit card delinquencies are also increasing, and according to a graph from the New York Fed, approximately 13% of credit card balances were 90 days or more past due in the fourth quarter of 2025, and the quarterly trend of credit card balances being 90 days or more delinquent remained at about 7%.
Younger borrowers are feeling the most pressure, with 18- to 29-year-olds running near the 9-10% zone for serious credit card delinquency, and 30- to 39-year-olds right behind, according to the New York Fed’s age breakdown.
This situation will change the tone for 2026. It looks like a tough late-cycle situation, with cracks widening in weak spots and policymakers moving closer to mitigation strategies as the year progresses.
This is important for Bitcoin. This is because Bitcoin will be on a path of liquidity, risk appetite, and forced selling long before the recession label appears on the calendar.
The macro outlook for 2026 looks like friction, not collapse.
The reason I continue to oppose the “everything must collide together” framework is because the world’s forward-looking plumbing continues to present a confusing environment.
The IMF says the global economy is stable as technology investment and adaptability offset trade policy headwinds. The World Bank uses the term resilience to explicitly talk about easing financial conditions to cushion the economic slowdown. Although the OECD emphasizes vulnerabilities, we remain in a projected world of continued growth.
On the higher-frequency side, the JPMorgan Global Composite PMI for January was 52.5, a level that is historically in line with global GDP moving at an annual rate of about 2.6%, according to S&P Global’s own readings. It’s both boring and growth.
Trade is another place where people expect the world to collapse first, but that too is complicated. The UNCTAD Trade Update for 2026 refers to fragmentation and regulatory pressures, but pressures and disruptions are different. The Kiel Trade Indicator is useful here because it is closer to real-time than most macro data and helps distinguish shipping drama from actual demand conditions.
Winter seems to have already arrived for Bitcoin’s security budget
There’s a reason my original bear paper was based on miner economics. In minor economics, Bitcoin’s real-world cost fits into its market structure.
On January 29, miners generated approximately $37.22 million in revenue per day. Total daily trading fees paid on the same day were approximately $260,550.
This fee percentage will be approximately 0.7%.
This number is important because it tells you how the chain is actually secured. Fees have rounding errors, the system is biased toward issuance, and issuance is decreasing on schedule. So when the going gets tough, the burden will be pushed back onto prices and the hash economy.
This can also be felt in the price market for live performances. On the mempool feed, the median fee prediction for the next block looked long and sleepy, exactly the kind of environment where a sharp price leg could arrive even without a “macro” headline.
This is why the $49,000 to $52,000 zone still makes sense as a cycle floor to me. That’s the level at which the market tends to stop debating the story and start moving stock away from forced sellers and impatient holders to allocators waiting for numbers that can be resized.
The ETF era gave us a clean stress gauge and the gauge kept blinking.
The second pillar of my framework is flow elasticity, and ETF pipes are the cleanest version of that idea.
In late January, flows looked like risk appetite was leaking out, even though prices were trying to hold.
Pharcyde had multiple mass leaks, including -$708.7 million on January 21st and -$817.8 million on January 29th, and as of January 30th, when I checked in, the total year-to-date was -$1.095 billion. Since then, total annual flows have reached negative $1.8 billion, leaving $1 billion in Fidelity’s FBTC alone.
These are the kinds of numbers that change the psychology of the dip. In the ETF-friendly era, down days result in stable net buying because allocators treat weakness like inventory. In the emphatic version, the pipe becomes a drain and the market must find a clearing price that puts the drain back up for bid.
Importantly, this dynamic can continue while the rest of the world appears to be doing well. While stock prices may rise and growth projections may remain intact, Bitcoin could still cause a severe internal reset. This is because its dominant marginal buyers and sellers are visualized through the daily flow table.
Miner now runs two businesses, which changes how Drawdown feels
The public interest perspective in this cycle is that miners are no longer just Bitcoin margin machines.
Many of them now appear to be power and infrastructure operators with attached Bitcoin divisions.
This change is important for two reasons.
First, the survival calculation changes. Having a second revenue stream allows you to keep the lights on in a low-rate environment and continue to fund capital investments even when the hash economy looks tough.
Second, behavior changes under stress. Miners with compute roadmaps could fund ramp-ups, protect liquidity in power contracts, or sell Bitcoin in ways that make network conditions more flexible at the very moment the market wants stability.
This change can be seen in the announcement. TeraWulf has signed a long-term AI hosting agreement involving large capacity, with Google involved in its structure, according to a company release. DataCenterDynamics reported that Riot is considering options to pivot capacity towards AI and HPC.
Zoom out and imagine what that means on the ground. The team negotiates power, controls shareholders, plans data holes, buys machines, and still competes in the toughest hash race on the planet. This has a lot of moving parts, and when prices start to fall, the moving parts create reflexive market behavior.
This is why I believe the market is feeling like winter under the hood, even though the charts haven’t delivered a full cathartic flush yet.
Why $49,000 bottoms will still fit even if 2026 remains economically boring
When you put the pieces together, the path becomes very simple.
Macro looks resilient enough, but synchronized global risk events are slipping out of the center lane. The recession probability of the polymarket reflects this. The growth forecasting agencies IMF, World Bank and OECD are in the same region.
Bitcoin’s internal affairs remain tense, with fees making up a small portion of miner revenue, ETF flows showing a substantial risk-off window, and Menpool’s fee market looking lethargic.
The combination heightens the tension.
Usually the tension is resolved with a quick move, a couple of sharp legs fall, there is a moment when the leverage is washed away, and a new group of buyers enters with confidence.
Another thing that ties this together is that the build-up of stress in the real economy is starting to show up in places that markets tend to ignore until they can no longer ignore it.
Both the S&P bankruptcies and the New York Fed’s delinquency graph show the same reality: Many businesses and households are running out of space. There is no need for a stock market crash to be a problem.
It tightens credit, prolongs discretionary spending, increases the probability that interest rates will fall over time, and sets up the policy response that tends to occur after data reveals tensions.
A final flush could still occur due to Bitcoin-specific mechanisms, fees remain depressed, miner economics are squeezed, and ETF flow tables remain sloppy. The macro layer adds a second element. That is, a world where stress quietly increases and the path to easier conditions becomes shorter.
Once the market achieves a mechanical reset, there could be a friendlier liquidity regime on the other side, and that’s the part that interests me the most.
My $49,000 to $52,000 zone is still the base case for that type of transfer. Looking at it from here, it’s close enough to feel plausible and psychologically clean enough to attract size, especially from allocators who are waiting for less than $50,000 to treat Bitcoin as inventory.
Macro wildcards still exist and always will. Geopolitics can always disrupt the world of neat predictions. The China and Taiwan escalation markets are actively traded in polymarkets, and their probabilities change rapidly as headlines are reported.
My focus remains intentionally boring. Fees, ETF flows, and miner behavior.
Even if the global economy continues to move forward and stocks act as if nothing is wrong, there is still a chance that stocks will soar into the $40,000 range if they remain depressed while prices continue to fall.
(Tag translation)Bitcoin
