Bitcoin's monthly RSI just printed a 2022-low reading. Jamie Coutts says the bear is closer to its end than its middle.

Bitcoin's monthly relative-strength index has fallen to a level not seen since the 2022 bear market, a Cointelegraph market note flagged at 19:32 UTC on 11 July 2026. Hours earlier, Real Vision chief crypto analyst Jamie Coutts told the outlet the asset is likely in the second half of its drawdown, with fading downside momentum and a developing path higher.

The pairing is deliberate. A monthly RSI print that revisits 2022 trough territory is, on its face, a confirmation of weakness. Coutts reads the same print as a late-cycle signature. The two framings sit inside a market that has spent eighteen months digesting the post-ETF rally, the 2024 halving supply shock, and a broader risk-asset regime that has rewarded patience over leverage. Whether the RSI is a warning or a buy signal depends almost entirely on which cycle clock the observer trusts.

The monthly print and what it actually says

The relative-strength index measures the magnitude of recent gains against recent losses on a bounded scale; on monthly candles, it smooths out intra-quarter noise and tracks who has been in control for the better part of a year. Cointelegraph's 11 July 2026 market note observed that the reading has not been this low since 2022, the cycle whose floor formed after the FTX collapse and the broader deleveraging of that year's second half. The note did not assign a specific RSI value, and the sources available to this publication do not specify one either. That matters: the index is a continuous variable, and the distance between, say, 28 and 35 is the difference between a textbook oversold signal and a softer "buyer fatigue" reading.

What the print confirms, regardless of the precise figure, is that sellers have dominated monthly candles for long enough to drag the oscillator into territory associated with prior cycle bottoms. That is the empirical case for caution. It is also, depending on the framework, the empirical case for accumulation. Both reads are consistent with the same data.

Coutts's counter-narrative

Coutts's argument, as paraphrased by Cointelegraph on 11 July 2026, is that downside momentum is fading and the second half of the bear is now in train. He is not calling an immediate bottom and he is not calling a new all-time high. He is calling a regime change inside the existing downtrend: a transition from impulsive selling to compressed, lower-volatility basing.

The analyst's separate, longer-horizon view, also reported by Cointelegraph in the same window, is that a $1 million Bitcoin by 2030 is premature but a move toward $250,000 "over the next couple of years" is within the realm of his confidence. That second figure deserves to be read carefully. It is not a price target tied to a specific catalyst. It is a shape-of-the-curve claim: if the next halving cycle behaves like prior cycles in supply-shock-adjusted terms, the implied terminal price two to three years out sits in that neighbourhood. Coutts's framing puts him in a defined camp, the cyclical-bull camp, but with an unusually early entry point relative to most proponents of that view.

The structural frame, in plain language

Markets do not bottom when the news is good. They bottom when the news is uniformly bad and a critical mass of capital has decided the bad news is already in the price. That mechanism is not unique to crypto. It is the same pattern that prints in equity drawdowns, in commodity cycle troughs, and in credit spreads after a defaults wave. The oscillator is a proxy for the pattern, not the pattern itself.

Inside crypto specifically, the 2022 trough had a clear exogenous trigger: the visible insolvency of a major venue, FTX, which forced a wave of forced selling that no chart pattern could have predicted. The 2026 picture lacks an equivalent shock. The drawdown has been slower, more distributed, and more entangled with macro liquidity conditions than with a single counterparty failure. That structural difference is doing some of the work behind Coutts's "fading momentum" claim. A bear that is grinding on liquidity is more likely to roll over quietly than one that is grinding on fraud unwinds.

The counter-frame is equally plain. A monthly RSI that revisits 2022 lows can also be the start of a multi-month process in which the index stays depressed while price chops sideways. The 2018-19 cycle bottom took roughly fourteen months to resolve after the first oversold monthly print. Anyone using the current reading as a stand-alone timing signal is selecting one statistic from a larger distribution.

What is actually being priced

The honest answer is that the market is pricing uncertainty about three things simultaneously: the path of US real rates, the pace of institutional flow into spot vehicles, and the regulatory perimeter around self-custody and stablecoins in the major jurisdictions. None of those inputs resolves cleanly on a monthly candle. What resolves cleanly is positioning. By the time a monthly RSI revisits a prior cycle trough, the speculative long tail has typically been washed out, and the marginal buyer shifts from leverage-sensitive fast money to longer-duration allocators with multi-year horizons.

Coutts's $250,000 figure is, in effect, a positioning call dressed as a price target. It tells readers what kind of buyer he expects to be dominant in two to three years: not the retail trader who drove the 2021 spike, but the balance-sheet allocator for whom a four-figure entry is a rounding error. Whether that allocator shows up at the scale the framework implies is a separate question, and one the available sources do not resolve.

What the sources leave uncertain

Three points of contestation remain. First, no specific RSI value has been published in the materials reviewed for this article; the comparison to 2022 is qualitative. Second, the time horizon in Coutts's $250,000 framing is "the next couple of years," a phrase wide enough to encompass several distinct macro regimes. Third, the broader market context, including spot ETF flows, futures basis, and stablecoin supply on major venues, is not addressed in the source items reviewed here, and any inference about those flows would extend beyond what the available reporting supports.

What the sources do support is narrower and more useful: the monthly oscillator has revisited a level last seen during the 2022 cycle, and at least one senior analyst at a research shop with a long track record in cycle analysis reads that print as a late-stage rather than a mid-stage signature. Readers building a view from here should weight that judgment against the alternative reading the same print permits, and against the macro inputs that no chart pattern can price on its own.

Desk note: Monexus reports the Cointelegraph market note and the Coutts interview as published, without endorsing either the cyclical-bull framing or the alternative read that the same monthly RSI print extends the basing process. Where the source material is qualitative ("hasn't been this low since 2022"), the article preserves that hedge rather than substituting a numeric RSI that the underlying reporting does not contain.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://t.me/cointelegraph
• https://t.me/cointelegraph