It is starting to look like most of the dust is settling after a violent move down a few weeks ago. Questions arose about which companies became forced sellers and how large the possible contagion could be. The immediate threat of an even larger sell-off is waning. It’s time to dive deeper into what we can expect next. One way to do that is to compare the recent drawdown with the one in 2022. The letter will take you through multiple angles and lenses to look at the current price action versus 2022. But maybe even more importantly, we’re trying to give the price action more context by adding on-chain data to it, so we can compare both setups from a more holistic view. As you’ve come to expect from me, I always like to start off with the framework that gives some sense of where bitcoin is trading on a relative basis. Price bounced off the bottom of our ‘Winter Zone’ that we’ve identified last year. As we pointed out in the letter ‘When The Going Gets Tough’, there is a lot of confluence in the $68,000 to $54,000 area.
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This shared-custody framework blends institutional-grade security with the sovereignty of individual key ownership. From that foundation, Unchained offers services for long-term bitcoin strategies: trade directly from your vault, access dollar liquidity through bitcoin-collateralized commercial loans, open a bitcoin IRA while holding your keys, or create business and trust accounts for multi-generational planning. For elevated private-client service, Unchained Signature provides a dedicated account manager, discounted trading, exclusive events, and more. If you’re building a durable bitcoin position and want a custody partner designed for that responsibility, visit unchained.com and use code TBL10 for 10% off your new bitcoin multisig vault. An important point that we’ve been trying to bring home is the fact that markets need time to find (temporary) equilibrium before making their next move. We’ve created a simple algorithm that detects when price is ranging and when price is marking up or down. Thinking in ranges (letting the market find its current temporary fair price) gives clarity and structure to expectations and helps plan for next moves. Bitcoin experienced a markdown from a range with the Point-of-Control at $87,000 towards the Point-of-Control at $67,000 in the new range. Without a big external impact on price, continuation of the range is more likely than a breakout of the range. The range is based on traded volume and doesn’t mean that when price goes above or beneath the Value Area High or Value Area Low, that it’s a breakout. The range is just saying that 95% of the traded volume happened between these prices.
A narrative that is making the rounds on the internet is the resemblance of the 2022 drawdown versus the current drawdown. Before embracing this narrative or completely discarding it, let’s analyse it first. The next chart shows the entire downtrend of the previous cycle versus the downtrend of the current cycle. We’ve used numbers 1 through 4 to be able to identify which leg down the particular move is most comparable to. Yes, this is meant to trigger you. This should trigger you, not in the sense of getting emotional about it, but in triggering you to think for yourself. But even though it might be scary, it is necessary to do the mental work and assess if this narrative makes sense or if the context is so different, it doesn’t hold up. Discarding it because of fear or bias isn’t the best way to deal with such a narrative.
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Wednesday, February 25, 2026
Same Old Song
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