Bitcoin has entered a bear market, with the market showing signs of “capitulation,” a price analyst has claimed — while other observers call for calm.
After falling below the $80,000 mark for the first time since April 2025 yesterday, Bitcoin continued to drop, bottoming out at just over $77,000 in the evening of January 31. The coin has since made a slow if undramatic recovery, moving back to near $79,000 at the time of writing on February 1.
“A sequence of breakdowns across major support levels reinforces the view that the market has shifted regime, indicating that Bitcoin has entered a bear market,” wrote Carmelo Alemán, a trader and an analyst at the crypto analytics firm CryptoQuant. Alemán said Bitcoin spot and futures trading patterns were now decidedly “bearish.”
He said the market was now in a phase of “capitulation,” whereby “a large share of market participants” would suffer losses.
The volatility comes as market observers talk of turbulent times ahead for Bitcoin, forecasting further falls to $75,000, or even as low as $10,000.
“Bitcoin is dropping as selling pressure persists, with no fresh capital coming in,” Ki Young Ju, CryptoQuant’s CEO, wrote on X.
“When [the] market cap falls in that environment, it’s not a bull market,” Ju said.
But while some predicted mass sell-offs and further market chaos, other analysts called for calm and suggested talk of a Bitcoin bear market was premature.
Price “corrections” of 35%-40% are “historically not unheard of for a Bitcoin bull run,” the Bitcoin analyst PlanC wrote on X. “$75,000–$80,000 is a 37% to 40% correction. [There’s a] decent chance this will be the deepest pullback opportunity this Bitcoin bull run.”
“Never trust a Sunday dump in Bitcoin’s price,” the Bitcoin price analyst Rajat Soni said on X.
Some have attributed Bitcoin’s poor recent performance to President Donald Trump’s call on Friday to nominate Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve chair. The news of Warsh’s nomination sent the prices of precious metals like silver into a nosedive.
However, some experts again called for calm. Analysts told Bloomberg that Warsh was unlikely to preside over an “aggressive easing cycle” of interest rate cuts.
“We advise against overdoing the Warsh hawkish trade across asset markets. We even see some risk of a whipsaw,” said Krishna Guha, the vice chair at Evercore ISI, an economic research firm. “We see Warsh as a pragmatist, not an ideological hawk in the tradition of the independent conservative central banker.”
Tim Alper is a News Correspondent at DL News. Got a tip? Email him at tdalper@dlnews.com.