Bloomberg Intelligence senior commodity strategist Mike McGlone said bitcoin could still fall back toward and potentially below the $10,000 area, arguing that crypto remains trapped in a broader macro unwind tied to deflationary pressure, overstretched risk assets and what he described as excess across the digital-asset complex.
Speaking in an interview with EllioTrades, McGlone reiterated a call he first revived when bitcoin was above $100,000: that the market could again “lop off a zero.” This time, he framed the thesis less as a pure crypto-cycle forecast and more as a macro view on what happens when speculative assets begin to roll over together.
The Thesis For $10,000 Bitcoin
McGlone’s core argument was that bitcoin is no longer trading as a detached alternative asset. In his telling, it has been absorbed into the same cross-asset risk regime as equities, commodities and broader liquidity conditions. “Bitcoin was one in 2009 and now there’s 37 million cryptocurrencies,” he said. “Bitcoin was one. So limited supply. But this space led the way up in risk assets… Now they’re leading the way lower.”
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He tied that view to what he sees as a post-inflation deflationary phase, with bond markets, not crypto, likely to be the next relative winners. McGlone said the sharp move in energy, metals and crypto volatility has not yet fully spilled into equities, but expects that to change. His base case is that stock-market volatility rises materially from still-subdued levels, triggering a deeper correction in both equities and digital assets.
That, in turn, underpins his bitcoin target. McGlone said he is not identifying $10,000 as a precise cycle low so much as the most important long-duration trading zone in the asset’s history from 2019-2020. “If you look at the highest most widely traded price in Bitcoin since 2020, maybe even going out to 2019, it’s 10,000 or lower and has a history of fluctuating around 10,000,” he said. “So my premise is we’re going back to that level.”
The strategist was especially blunt about the rest of the sector. He argued that stablecoins are the only clear structural winners inside crypto because they “track something physical,” namely the dollar and Treasury-based collateral. Everything else, he suggested, depends largely on speculative belief. He pointed to the massive growth of Tether and broader crypto-dollar supply as evidence that the base layer of the ecosystem is increasing dollar demand, not appreciation in volatile tokens.
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McGlone also said the speculative excess of 2024 and 2025, amplified by memecoins, ETFs and post-election enthusiasm around Donald Trump, may have marked a durable top for the broader asset class. “The bottom line is these risk assets have to prove me wrong,” he said. “Otherwise, I see us navigating and riding a bear market in equities, a bull market in volatility that’s barely getting started.”
EllioTrades pushed back on both the magnitude of the bitcoin call and the idea that crypto is effectively “dead,” arguing that Bitcoin could still reassert itself as a debasement hedge and that stablecoin-based agentic commerce, privacy use cases and a post-washout class of surviving projects could support a future recovery. He also argued that, while many tokens may still go to zero, the surviving tokens of the market may follow a familiar purge-and-rebirth pattern seen in earlier cycles.
McGlone did not rule out that crypto eventually finds a bottom. But his message was that the market is not there yet. For now, he said, bitcoin and the wider complex are still behaving like risk assets in a bear phase and until equities correct more meaningfully and stay down for a while, rallies should be treated with caution rather than as proof that the cycle has turned.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $69,890.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
