Bitcoin's bear market is past the halfway point, Real Vision's Jamie Coutts argues

On 11 July 2026, with bitcoin trading well off its prior cycle peak, Real Vision's chief crypto analyst Jamie Coutts made a call that runs against the prevailing tape: the bear market, he argued, is past its halfway mark. Downside momentum is fading, the structural setup is cleaner than the 2022 wash-out, and a path toward $250,000 over the next couple of years is more plausible than another grind to the lows. He drew the line at $1 million by 2030, calling that scenario premature (Cointelegraph, 11 July 2026).

Coutts is one of the more quoted macro analysts in digital assets, and his argument matters less for the price target than for the framing. A bear market declared "over" is a different animal from a bear market still scaring capital away. If half the cycle is behind us, the remaining drawdown risk is bounded. If it isn't, the same analysts now rotating back in risk getting steam-rolled again.

The case for the second half

Coutts' read leans on a familiar toolkit applied to an unfamiliar tape. Drawing-cycle momentum, supply-and-demand on the chain, and a comparison with prior capitulations, he concludes that downside conviction is bleeding out faster than price is. Buying pressure is showing up earlier in the cycle than in 2022. Sellers, by his count, are thinner (Cointelegraph, 11 July 2026).

The argument has at least one merit: it is falsifiable. A second-half call either ages well or collapses on the next leg down. Coutts pegged a $250,000 ceiling as a multi-year probability, with the upper band of $1 million by 2030 reserved for "too early to call." That hedge is unusual in a market built on hyperbolic targets.

For most of the past two cycles, the dominant pattern has been late-stage capitulation, extended basing, and a slow grind higher before the next blow-off. If Coutts is right that the basing is already in, the implication is that capital allocators who waited for a clean macro signal have largely missed the bottom by the time the signal arrives.

Why the bears are still in the fight

The bear case has not disappeared. It has merely changed shape. Macro liquidity remains the swing variable, and the same analysts celebrating muted downside momentum a cycle ago were proven wrong when central banks pivoted. Structural demand for spot ETFs has widened the buyer base, but it has also handed the supply side a more efficient venue to distribute into strength.

The counter-read is straightforward: the apparent thaw in downside momentum is a function of compressed volatility, not of new demand. In compressed regimes, every directional move is smaller, and the absence of a flush is not the same as the presence of accumulation. Analysts who called the 2022 bottom on similar evidence were, in retrospect, early.

There is also a positioning argument. By the time a Real Vision chief analyst is on Cointelegraph arguing the bear is past midpoint, several quant desks have already aligned. Crowded half-cycle calls are a documented failure mode.

What sits behind the call

A second-half call is rarely just a chart call. It is a thesis about the environment that produced the bear: monetary conditions, the funding of risk assets, and the regulatory ceiling on the asset class. Coutts is signalling, implicitly, that the worst of the macro headwinds has passed and that the structural case (scarce supply, growing institutional plumbing, weakening dollar reserve utility) is intact enough to outlast the next quarter.

That framing fits a broader repositioning in markets commentary: the question is no longer whether bitcoin is a legitimate asset class, but how to size it inside one. The plumbing answer (spot ETFs, custodian banks, balance-sheet treasury allocations) has arrived faster than the price action that would normally validate it.

The risk in that framing is that structural arguments are slow-moving. They rarely call exact cycle bottoms. They call direction over years. A second-half call sits awkwardly between a tactical claim and a structural one, and that is where most cycle-callers get burned.

What to watch through year-end

The next three prints that matter are macro, not technical. A second-half thesis survives a hawkish surprise from a major central bank; it does not survive a succession of them. The price action through the autumn options expiry will test how much of the buying pressure is real and how much is short-covering into thin books.

For allocators, the more useful question is not whether Coutts is right at $250,000 by the late decade. It is whether the second-half framing justifies adding exposure now, when the same argument was made a year ago and then partially failed. The honest answer in mid-July 2026 is that the data is genuinely mixed, the macro path is uncertain, and the asymmetry that made early-cycle entries attractive is narrowing.

Coutts' $1 million figure was the headline; his $250,000 was the substance. The difference is the difference between a market that has already repriced and one that still has to.

Desk note: This piece treats Cointelegraph's reporting of Jamie Coutts' Real Vision analysis as the primary record. The sources do not include on-chain data or exchange-flow verification beyond Coutts' own characterisation, and readers should weight the second-half call accordingly.

Wire provenance

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

• https://t.me/cointelegraph