For a market that is supposedly in a bull run, it doesn’t feel that way. Sure, Bitcoin may have hit a few all-time highs this cycle, but the rallies have had no problem sparking yawns and the corrections have been brutal. Altcoins are down 90% or more. Retail is gone. And even the diehards wonder whether this so-called bull cycle even deserves the name.
In many ways, this is the toughest bull market crypto has ever seen. Bitcoin has doubled since its 2023 low, but the market’s soul feels hollowed out. What happened? Altcoin trader “Crypto Birb” breaks it off in three main reasons.
The settings sucked the air out of the room
Wall Street didn’t just get going this cycle; it moved in and was redecorated. BlackRock, Fidelity and Goldman did not come to speculate; they were given access to infrastructure, custody networks and tokenized real-world assets. Institutional adoption is the nice headline, but what it really means is extraction on a massive scale. They don’t play memecoins or chase airdrops. They bought the pipes, liquidity rails and compliance corridors that everyone else had to rent.
Like Telcoin Magazine and Fortune both remarkinstitutional adoption was ‘fundamental, not speculative’ in early 2025. That’s great for Bitcoin, terrible for the culture. As Crypto Birb notes:
“Smart money took what is valuable – good for them.”
Memecoins and the collapse of meaning
If institutions professionalized the space, memecoins disfigured it. What started as satire became the dominant narrative of 2024 and 2025. Each week brought a new “community” token, a new animal, a new political joke, and a new wave of burned holders.
Memecoins turned crypto into a casino without exit doors. Token after token was pumped only to virality and then craters. Even industry veterans who should have known better were caught chasing hype over substance. It was the perfect storm of self-sabotage: retail greed met Web3 irony, and both fell.
Trump, interest rates and risk reversal
Even macroeconomic conditions worked against the risk. President Trump’s trade wars and tariffs, praised by some for protectionism, caused a 20% drop in stocks and sapped liquidity. Combined with persistently high interest rates, capital became expensive, speculative flows dried up and risk assets such as cryptocurrencies crashed.
Ironically, the “pro-crypto administration” ultimately froze the retail comeback. With interest rates high, consumer spending slowed and the average investor’s appetite for 100x tokens disappeared. What should have been the age of plenty turned into a test of patience.
Bitcoin is the sole survivor of this bull cycle
And yet, amid all the rubble, Bitcoin continues to exist, slow, stable and sovereign. Institutional capital has strengthened its legitimacy while everything else is burning. If the state of Crypto from a16zreportshows that Bitcoin’s strength is supported by macro forces and regulatory acceptance
This is what maturity looks like: less euphoria, less parabolic charts, and a market that finally behaves like a financial system instead of a playground. But for those who came here to “up the numbers,” it feels like a punishment.
The hollow bull
This bull cycle is not exciting; it’s tiring. Bitcoin’s resilience proves that crypto can endure. But the rest of the market, its creativity, its retail energy and its wild optimism were collateral damage.
Perhaps that is the price of progress. Or maybe it’s a sign that somewhere along the way we lost the script and chased the meme to the detriment of the mission. As Crypto Birb states:
“We’ve been played. BY OURSELVES. This is our punishment for choosing hype over utility.”
Either way, this bull run will go down in history not for its gains, but for its lesson: not all cycles are designed to make you rich. Some are there to remind you why you are here.
