The crypto market may still be obsessed with old cycle scripts, but the next phase could look very different.
For years, Bitcoin’s trajectory has been framed through the lens of the four-year halving cycle: supply shock, euphoric rally, brutal crash, repeat. That framework helped explain much of the market’s behavior in its earlier, retail-driven phases. But as institutional capital deepens its presence, regulated vehicles expand access, and crypto-native infrastructure matures, the old narrative may no longer be enough.
CoinEx Research has been among the voices arguing that the market is entering a structurally different era. In its annual outlook, Crypto Market Outlook 2026: Unlock Certainty in Volatility, the firm set out a base-case scenario in which Bitcoin could reach $180,000 by the end of 2026. The projection drew attention, but the broader thesis behind it may be more important than the number itself: Bitcoin is increasingly being shaped by a combination of macro liquidity, institutional flows, and crypto-native catalysts rather than by halving alone.
According to Jeff Ko, Chief Analyst at CoinEx, that target should not be mistaken for a promise. It is, he says, a probability-weighted outcome built on several conditions that have yet to fully align.
“The $180,000 base case is not a guarantee,” Ko says.
“We maintain that view based on the macro backdrop, the supply cycle, and the continued buildout of institutional infrastructure. But we follow data, not narrative.”
In CoinEx’s view, the single most important variable remains the global liquidity cycle. For Bitcoin to move toward that higher-end scenario, the Federal Reserve would need to do more than deliver a token rate cut or two. What matters is a sustained easing posture that materially loosens dollar liquidity conditions. Historically, when real yields fall and the U.S. dollar weakens, capital tends to rotate toward both risk assets and hard assets, creating a more constructive environment for Bitcoin.
Regulation is the other key variable. Markets often price uncertainty more harshly than bad news. A clearer legal framework for digital assets in the United States, especially if the CLARITY Act were to advance meaningfully, could help reduce one of the most persistent structural drags on institutional participation. Combined with regulatory progress in Europe and major Asian markets, CoinEx believes that would support deeper engagement from asset managers, corporate treasuries, and other allocators that have so far remained cautious.
Paradoxically, some of the market’s most fearful sentiment readings do not necessarily invalidate that thesis. Ko argues that they may actually fit it.
“Historically, periods of extreme fear have more often marked accumulation zones than distribution zones,” he says.
Still, CoinEx is explicit about what would force a reassessment. If inflation were to reaccelerate sharply, pushing the Fed back toward aggressive tightening and removing the prospect of meaningful easing through mid-2026, then the macro basis for the forecast would weaken materially. In that scenario, the firm says it would likely revisit the target.
Why CoinEx Thinks the Halving Script Is Breaking Down
Skeptics might argue that the market does not look so different after all. Bitcoin has still experienced a severe correction, and visually, the pattern can resemble previous bear phases. But CoinEx believes the underlying structure of the market has changed in ways that matter.
The first and most visible difference is the role of spot Bitcoin ETFs. In previous cycles, there was no continuously operating, regulated institutional buying mechanism of comparable scale. For CoinEx, the significance of ETFs lies not only in the size of inflows, but in how those flows behave under stress.
Earlier corrections were often dominated by retail capitulation, cascading liquidations, and limited institutional counterbalance. In the current environment, however, CoinEx points to continued ETF net inflows even during periods of market weakness. That, Ko argues, suggests the emergence of a structural bid that can absorb some selling pressure rather than allowing every correction to spiral into the kind of collapse seen in past cycles.
That helps explain why CoinEx does not expect another 80% Bitcoin drawdown of the kind that defined earlier eras. A 47% correction may still be painful, but in the firm’s framework, it does not automatically imply the old cycle is intact.
The derivatives market is another area where CoinEx sees meaningful change. In earlier cycles, derivatives often acted as a volatility amplifier, magnifying price swings as leveraged traders rushed in and out of positions. Today, the composition of activity appears different, especially in markets such as CME Bitcoin futures.
In 2020 and 2021, open interest on CME was driven more heavily by directional traders and hedge funds expressing momentum views. CoinEx believes that a larger share now appears to come from basis traders running cash-and-carry arbitrage strategies. These participants are generally less likely to panic during price declines, and their presence may help stabilize rather than intensify volatility.
CoinEx also points to earlier-than-usual volatility compression as a sign of a maturing market with deeper liquidity and a broader holder base. The firm’s view is reinforced by Bitcoin’s changing relationship with equities. Rather than maintaining a fixed correlation with the Nasdaq, Bitcoin increasingly appears to move in a regime-dependent way: more independently during crypto-specific developments, and more closely with equities during broad macro shocks.
That behavior matters. It suggests Bitcoin is no longer simply replaying a neat post-halving template. Instead, it is increasingly influenced by a layered interaction between macro conditions, institutional allocation behavior, and internal crypto market developments.
A More Selective Market, Not a Broad Altcoin Revival
That same logic of structural change also informs CoinEx’s view on altcoins.
In late 2025, Ko said liquidity would become “ruthlessly selective,” flowing primarily into blue-chip projects with real utility. At first glance, that may seem difficult to reconcile with an exchange model that supports a wide range of altcoins. But CoinEx argues that research and exchange operations serve different purposes.
The research view is essentially a statement about return dispersion. CoinEx does not expect a broad, indiscriminate altseason in which liquidity lifts all tokens at once. Instead, it expects capital to become increasingly concentrated in projects with stronger adoption, clearer use cases, and more resilient positioning.
That does not mean an exchange should narrow its market offering to match only its highest-conviction research calls. Exchanges exist to provide access, liquidity, price discovery, and risk transfer across a broad set of assets for different kinds of users. Some want long-term exposure. Others want tactical trading opportunities, ecosystem access, or early-stage optionality.
In that framework, listing breadth is not endorsement breadth. Supporting a wide universe of assets does not mean telling users they all deserve the same long-term allocation.
The distinction is increasingly important in a market where capital may no longer reward indiscriminate speculation. If CoinEx’s thesis is right, the coming phase will be defined less by market-wide exuberance and more by selective flows, durability, and utility.
CoinEx’s Product Strategy: Extending the Core, Not Chasing a New Narrative
That emphasis on practicality also shapes CoinEx’s recent product expansion.
In 2025, the company launched three products aimed at different user needs: CoinEx Vault, an institutional self-custody solution; CoinEx OnChain, which allows users to trade DEX-linked assets through a CEX interface; and CoinEx Pay, a payment product designed for real-world crypto settlement.
Rather than describing these products as a separate growth engine, CoinEx frames them as infrastructure extensions of its core business. The company’s main growth priority, it says, remains the continuous improvement of the trading experience. In that sense, Vault, OnChain, and Pay are not a pivot away from exchange services but a way of making the exchange ecosystem more complete.
Among the three, CoinEx appears to see OnChain as the closest extension of its central trading business. The product is designed to serve users who want exposure to long-tail or early-stage assets without waiting for a formal spot listing. More importantly, it reflects CoinEx’s broader view that centralized exchanges still have a long-term role in an increasingly on-chain market.
That role, however, is changing.
CoinEx argues that CEXs will no longer define themselves purely as the sole venue of execution. Instead, they may increasingly function as an access layer, trust layer, and service layer around decentralized liquidity. Even if decentralized exchange interfaces improve dramatically, many users will still prefer not to manage seed phrases, bridge assets manually, sign multiple transactions, or optimize gas and routing themselves. Products such as OnChain aim to abstract that complexity while preserving access to on-chain opportunities.
If that model works, the future of the centralized exchange may be less about competing with DeFi directly and more about packaging decentralized market access into a more usable, safer, and more compliant user experience.
Why CoinEx Thinks BTCFi Has Long-Term Potential
One of the clearest examples of that hybrid future is BTCFi.
Bitcoin-backed DeFi activity has grown significantly, and Bitcoin now ranks prominently in total value locked across DeFi ecosystems. But CoinEx is careful not to overstate what those numbers mean. A meaningful share of that TVL still comes from wrapped or bridged forms of Bitcoin such as WBTC and cbBTC, rather than from native Bitcoin programmability on Bitcoin’s own settlement layer.
That distinction matters. It shows that Bitcoin’s value is already being deployed in decentralized finance, but it does not necessarily mean Bitcoin’s own infrastructure is yet powering DeFi at scale. In CoinEx’s view, the more meaningful signal is the direction of innovation toward more native programmability and more trust-minimized Bitcoin-linked infrastructure, including projects such as Babylon and designs associated with BitVM.
CoinEx believes its connection to ViaBTC’s mining roots gives it a natural advantage in this area. Compared with exchanges that are more altcoin-centric, the company argues it has a deeper relationship with miners, long-term BTC holders, and Bitcoin-native users. But it also acknowledges that becoming a BTCFi hub would require much more than listing BTCFi tokens.
To play that role meaningfully, CoinEx would need to function as a practical access point for BTCFi exposure, simplifying discovery, trading, education, and capital rotation while filtering risk across a landscape that is still early and uneven in quality. In Ko’s view, a credible BTCFi platform should help users distinguish between serious Bitcoin-adjacent infrastructure, higher-quality yield opportunities, and more speculative wrappers or weak tokenization models that may not survive a full cycle.
The long-term case for BTCFi, CoinEx says, rests on a simple structural observation: Bitcoin remains the largest pool of relatively idle collateral in crypto. If even a modest share of that capital moves into lending, borrowing, structured yield, stablecoin backing, or cross-chain utility, the addressable market becomes enormous. But for BTCFi to endure, it has to offer real utility to Bitcoin holders without pushing them too far out on the risk curve.
The Killer App Question
CoinEx’s broader market worldview also shapes how it thinks about mass adoption.
The industry has spent years searching for a “killer app” that could bring Web3 into the mainstream in the same way that Facebook, Instagram, or Visa did for earlier waves of internet and financial infrastructure. CoinEx’s answer is not a social media clone or consumer super-app. Instead, it sees the strongest product-market fit emerging in two areas: cross-border payments based on crypto and stablecoins, and crypto-native financial infrastructure such as automated market makers, next-generation liquidity pools, and decentralized perpetuals.
That is a notably pragmatic answer. Rather than trying to build a consumer lifestyle brand inside Web3, CoinEx is positioning itself around infrastructure, access, and execution. It argues that its competitive edge lies in doing exchange-related functions exceptionally well, while enabling participation in the broader ecosystem rather than attempting to replace it.
That stance may not sound as glamorous as promising the “Instagram of Web3.” But it may be more consistent with where real adoption has already begun.
Where CoinEx Sees Overvaluation and Undervaluation in RWA
CoinEx applies a similarly practical filter to tokenized real-world assets.
The company remains cautious on tokenized private equity and venture capital, even though those segments often attract attention because they appear to promise liquidity for historically illiquid asset classes. CoinEx’s objection is straightforward: tokenization does not solve the core drivers of private market returns. Governance influence, operational value creation, information asymmetry, and manager quality still matter far more than whether an asset is wrapped in a token.
Nor does tokenization automatically solve the liquidity problem. At current market depth, CoinEx argues, the promised secondary market for tokenized private assets often remains more theoretical than real. In many cases, spreads and market depth still fall well short of what a mature secondary market would require. For that reason, the firm believes parts of the segment may be overvalued relative to the actual liquidity being delivered.
On the other hand, CoinEx remains constructive on tokenized Treasuries and short-duration government paper. In its view, these instruments already show real product-market fit and may still be underappreciated as the emerging base layer for on-chain cash management, collateral, and settlement. They combine legal clarity, yield visibility, institutional relevance, and relative operational simplicity in a way few other tokenized assets currently can.
The firm is also positive on tokenized trade finance, arguing that blockchain infrastructure maps directly onto longstanding pain points in that sector: slow settlement, documentation-heavy workflows, opaque counterparty risk, and constrained access for smaller businesses. In the same vein, CoinEx sees long-term potential in tokenized SME lending, where on-chain repayment histories, programmable collateral management, and transparent pool reporting could eventually open a new credit channel for smaller businesses while creating a potentially attractive asset class for investors.
A Market Defined Less by Hype Than by Structure
What emerges from CoinEx’s view is not simply a bullish call on Bitcoin or a product roadmap for one exchange. It is a broader argument that the crypto market is moving into a less theatrical and more structurally demanding phase.
In this version of the cycle, old narratives still matter, but they no longer explain enough on their own. Bitcoin is increasingly shaped by liquidity, institutions, and regulation rather than by halving alone. Altcoin markets may remain active, but capital is likely to become more selective. On-chain infrastructure is expanding, but usability, trust, and risk filtering still matter. And some of the most important growth segments may be the ones tied not to speculation, but to collateral, settlement, and practical financial plumbing.
If CoinEx is right, the next crypto cycle may not belong to the loudest story. It may belong to the strongest structure.
About CoinEx
Established in 2017, CoinEx is a user-centric cryptocurrency exchange backed by the industry-leading mining pool ViaBTC. Since its launch, CoinEx has been among the earliest exchanges to release proof-of-reserves and implement a 100% reserve policy, ensuring the security of user assets. Today, CoinEx serves over 10 million users across 200+ countries and regions and supports more than 1,100 cryptocurrencies with professional-grade features and services, establishing itself as a trusted crypto trading expert.
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