The market for Bitcoin may be entering a different stage from the one that has marked its trajectory since the cryptocurrency’s creation. For Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy Inc., the traditional four-year cycle, historically associated with halving events, is no longer the main factor responsible for the asset’s long-term movements.
In a post made on July 5 on the X network, Saylor stated that the market structure has changed significantly. According to him, halvings remain an essential part of the Bitcoin protocol because they reduce the issuance of new coins and preserve the maximum limit of 21 million units. Even so, their impact would no longer be sufficient to explain the market’s evolution.
“The four-year cycle is no longer the dominant model.”
For many years, investors associated Bitcoin’s up and down phases with the periodic reduction of the reward paid to miners. This mechanism reduced the supply of new coins and created expectations of appreciation after each halving.
In Saylor’s assessment, this behavior has lost ground as the market began to receive large volumes of institutional resources. The inflow of capital through Bitcoin ETFs, corporate reserves, and the integration of the cryptocurrency into traditional financial markets has come to exert growing influence on price formation.
The executive believes that this change represents a transition from supply-based logic to an environment guided mainly by demand. In his view, Bitcoin’s behavior will be increasingly determined by the continuous flow of capital.
“Over the next decade, bitcoin’s trajectory will be driven less by miners’ issuance and more by capital flows.”
This is not the first time Saylor has defended this thesis. In April, he had already stated that Bitcoin reached a stage of recognition as digital capital, maintaining that the market’s expansion depends on the participation of financial institutions, bank credit, and the infrastructure built around the digital currency.
Among the factors that are gaining relevance, Saylor highlights ETFs, corporate treasuries, sovereign reserves, derivatives markets, insurance, collateral operations, and the use of Bitcoin as a capital allocation instrument.
In practice, this represents a change in the profile of market participants. Instead of depending mainly on the entry of individual investors, the cryptocurrency’s growth would be sustained by the balance sheets of companies, financial institutions, and governments.
“This is the next phase of bitcoin adoption: not just more buyers, but more balance sheets.”
Even with this transformation, halvings remain part of Bitcoin’s structure. The difference, according to Saylor, is that future performance tends to depend on the ability of capital markets to maintain consistent investment flows, consolidating institutional participation as the main driver of the largest cryptocurrency in the market.