Last year wasn't what investors were expecting for Bitcoin (BTC +0.45%), as it ended the year down more than 6%, even though it set an all-time high earlier in October. My price target for 2025 was $150,000, and even by ballpark standards, the coin simply didn't grow enough to reach that value.
Today, the coin's price is about $91,500, and many of the same drivers that I had hoped would take it to $150,000 are still in play, plus a couple of new developments that could prove to be big opportunities for upside.
So, I predict once again that its price will reach $150,000 by the end of 2026. Here's why.
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Cycle theory is becoming untenable, and that's a good thing
As you may have heard, Bitcoin's issuance from mining gets cut in half roughly every four years in a process called the halving, which forces buyers to compete for a smaller pool of new supply forever after. Because the date of the halving is known in advance with a fair degree of accuracy, many crypto investors have historically believed that the coin's price follows a four-year pattern as a result of the predictable changes to its supply dynamics, which the halving causes.
So the lore goes, the pattern, which is broadly referred to as the four-year Bitcoin cycle, is that the second year after the halving is always a roaring bull phase in which the price of Bitcoin skyrockets, only to then collapse into a year-long bear market afterward before recovering in anticipation of the next halving. But the coin's poor performance in 2025 punches a pretty big hole in the timing proposed by that theory. Now, many crypto investors are giving up on the cycle theory altogether.
CRYPTO: BTC
Key Data Points
In my view, that's a good thing, because it means that there are fewer whales and other market participants expecting that 2026 will be a down year, which is to say that there are now also more people open to the idea that the coin could go up in value in 2026. So the abysmal sentiment that plagued much of 2025, despite the coin making new all-time highs, might actually now give way to a new paradigm in which people don't ditch their holdings and drive prices down in fear of an incipient bear market every three or so years.
Put differently, the odds of cycle theory being a self-fulfilling prophecy of catastrophe for Bitcoin every once in a while are now lower than ever.
Quantum risk is scary, and progress in mitigating it is valuable
The other major reason I expect Bitcoin to reach $150,000 in 2026 is very different from the demise of cycle theory. I believe 2026 is the year that Bitcoin's developer team will start to take the risk posed by quantum computing far more seriously, and I anticipate that the process of starting to work toward mitigating that risk will make the coin significantly more valuable.
Let's unpack that, because there are a lot of moving pieces. Bitcoin relies on a certain type of cryptography to ensure that hackers can't just spend anyone's coins or create more of them out of thin air. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could, in theory, compromise that cryptography and enable attackers to wreak havoc on the chain, which might send its price to zero in a worst-case scenario.
To combat this, Bitcoin's developers have been debating which hoards of coins are most at risk, and how a migration to quantum-resistant blockchain tech might work, including the uncomfortable possibility of eventually restricting vulnerable coins from being spent or used at all.
Of course, there's not currently any quantum computer powerful enough to damage the chain, and there probably won't be for at least a handful of years, if not a decade or more. But, the uncertainty is itself a market input, as when a tail risk is hard to time, investors discount it harder than a risk with an obvious schedule. That implies making progress in mitigating the quantum threat will de-risk Bitcoin as an investment, and send its price up.
The odds of Bitcoin actually becoming quantum secure in 2026 are zero. At the same time, the odds of the ongoing discussions advancing with a bit more vigor are very high, as many of the coin's high-profile investors are actively discussing the risk and positing that it's a real problem that needs to be addressed, and preferably pronto.
Given the all-time highs made last year without any real improvement to the coin's fundamentals, I expect that if the market weighs the chances of such an improvement happening eventually as being high, it will help the coin's price rise, and likely to $150,000 or higher.
Stay tuned through next year, and we'll see if I'm right this time around.
