Bitcoin's former highs are no longer out of reach; the rapid surge may now be a thing of the past.

Author: Omkar Godbole Source: coindesk Translation: Sun Ohba, Golden Finance

Bitcoin’s price has pulled back into the all-time high range, signaling a slowdown in growth momentum and a maturing of the market.

Key takeaways

• This bear market cycle is pulling prices back to around the $70,000 level, back to the historical peak of the prior bull market, breaking the pattern from the past in which record highs were very rarely retouched again.

• The percentage gains in each bull market cycle for Bitcoin are also narrowing, reflecting the law of diminishing marginal returns— the higher the price gets, the more capital it takes to push it to set a new all-time high again.

• Traders’ psychological anchoring around the $70,000 level may become the key to judging whether this bear market is nearing its end.

Since its inception, Bitcoin has behaved like a daring rock climber continuously raising the bar, rarely looking back at the platforms it has already stood on. Even during the long and brutal bear market, its price has seldom fallen back to the peak levels of the prior bull market.

But this trend has already changed, marking the market’s increasing maturity and bringing an end to the era of explosive, above-market excess returns.

Bitcoin Price Hovering Near All-Time Peaks

Since early February, Bitcoin has remained range-bound around $70,000, far below the $126,000 all-time high of the 2023–2025 bull market.

The $70,000 threshold is significant—it was the historical peak of the market cycles from 2019 to 2022. In other words, this bear market has brought prices back fully to those prior highs.

This phenomenon is unusual. In early bear markets such as 2014 and 2018, Bitcoin had never dropped back to the peak of the previous cycle. The only exception was 2022, when the price broke below the $20,000 peak from 2017; at the time, analysts categorized it as an abnormal event, blaming a crypto scam and large-scale deleveraging.

The special feature of this pullback is that there hasn’t been an extreme external trigger; it’s simply that, under natural fluctuations of the bear market, the price has returned to the historical peak.

Slowing Growth and Diminishing Marginal Returns

In each new bull run for Bitcoin, the past pattern of parabolic, blowout surges is no longer seen. Pushing the price to break through prior highs has become increasingly difficult, and returning to historical highs has thus become the norm. That is to say, the old peak is no longer out of reach.

This is a textbook example of the law of diminishing marginal returns. As Bitcoin’s price rises, the amount of capital needed to push the price up grows ever larger. The era in which small inflows could trigger big rallies has effectively ended, and price volatility has therefore become more stable and more predictable.

Historical gain data clearly confirms this trend:

• In 2013, the peak rose 37 times compared with 2011

• In 2017, the peak rose 15 times compared with 2013

• In 2021, growth slowed to just 2 times the 2017 level

• In 2025, the peak above $126,000 saw gains of less than 1 times 2021’s peak

Even though prices are still rising, the growth rate continues to slow.

Institutional Inflow and Expanded Market Participation

Part of the reason for the slowdown is that Bitcoin’s institutionalization process is advancing and the derivatives market is expanding. Today, traders can engage in structured tools to trade and hedge around volatility, timing, and market direction—not merely betting on price increases. With more diversified participation, extreme market swings are smoothed out.

This is markedly different from the market before 2020. Back then, trading was essentially limited to spot buying and selling. Only the long-only participants who were firmly bullish on Bitcoin were active, and they would often step in to buy the dip as soon as prices fell.

Market Behavior Patterns and Future Outlook

Under the influence of the behavioral psychology of the “anchoring effect,” historical highs typically form strong support levels, and traders treat prior highs as the core reference benchmark.

Many investors who missed the first wave of upside will buy when the price falls back to familiar levels, building strength for the next upswing. When this behavioral pattern combines with the self-reinforcing effect of support and resistance levels, it also explains why this downturn has stalled around $70,000.

If the position sees a strong rebound, it may signal that the bear market is entering its final phase— similar to how prices in late 2022 stopped falling around $20,000.

But based on the law of diminishing marginal returns, the next upswing may be more steady and more in line with traditional financial market behavior, rather than the wild blowout rallies seen in previous speculative waves.