Bitcoin Is Down 48%. Is Now the Time to Buy? (Data Only)

Bitcoin is down 48% from all-time highs. We are in extreme fear once again, in single digits. This happens very regularly in crypto when we get these big corrections and everyone starts to panic and wonder, is this the end for Bitcoin and crypto? Well, I'm going to break down exactly what's happening below the surface. That's actual data, actual predictions, not the noise and chaos that we see online in crypto with everyone having a different opinion. I've been doing this now for 9 years and it never gets any easier when we get these big corrections in crypto, especially when fear is in the levels that we are right now at the 8 level for extreme fear. And the drawdowns are very real. Now there's also a lot of macro uncertainty that's going on. There's rising, you know, interest in, you know, global uncertainty with the Middle East. There's also rising inflation costs. There's AI that's impacting a lot of things. I want to really break it down and help you understand from a fundamental perspective what is happening so you can best decide whether or not you want to enter this market now or wait. I'm going to give you all of these insights today. If you're new to the channel, my name's Ben Simpson. I'm the founder of Collective Shift. We're one of the world's leading crypto crypto education companies, and we help high net worth and sophisticated investors protect and grow generational wealth through digital assets. I personally been investing in space for about 9 years now, verified compounding returns of 116% over the last 6 years, and I've helped thousands and thousands of people across the world invest into this space. And ultimately, when you're brand new, it can be very overwhelming. All right, the data doesn't necessarily give you any more confidence, especially when extreme fear is at these levels. And if you look at the previous drawdowns of market cycles, it's actually quite normal to see big drawdowns. So in the pink, you've got the drawdown percentage, uh, right going back. You know, we've had 4 major big corrections in Bitcoin's history, going right down to, you know, Bitcoin drew down 90% in 2012. We went down 80% in 2015, 82% in 2019, and then again, uh, 65% in 2023. Where we are right now, Bitcoin has only drawn down from a, from, from an all-time high perspective, uh, it's about 48% at the moment from all-time highs to now. I'm not sure why that chart is not showing that, uh, that number seems to be going down more than that, but we're about 48% down from all-time highs from a Bitcoin perspective. Now, uh, if we look at the, you know, previous drawdowns and cycle comparisons, uh, it is very normal to have these big corrections. Well, why does that happen? Well, it's actually a design, it's a feature, not a bug. You know, we start to see that You know, the ability to make money in digital assets is so ginormous because the volatility and uncertainty that it creates and the amount of, you know, people that get really worried and spooked when the market retraces. All right, so again, I'm not sure why that other chart didn't have the right number. We're 48% down from all-time highs to where we are right now. Now, what is happening below the surface? If we look really from an on-chain perspective, I like to look at a few different things. All right, so on-chain analysis is a great way to really understand where is this market moving, who is investing, who is selling at any one point in time. And this is really where we start to see the long-term investors starting to accumulate when we get these sell-off periods. Obviously, be fearful when people are greedy and greedy when people are fearful is a big, big reality in crypto. Uh, you know, this is our platform, one of the world's leading on-chain analysts in the world, in my opinion. Uh, we have to look below the surface and below the headlines and below the noise to really understand why you know, the market is moving in a certain way. But what we can see is that, you know, from the last probably, you know, 3 or 4 months, it's been, you know, a huge amount of sell pressure from retail investors. But we haven't seen too much, uh, you know, I guess unwinding of some of the institutional buyers. So if we look back, uh, from recent times, like the, the ETF net inflows, we saw obviously from, you know, November to, uh February, a big capitulation, I guess you would call it, or consistent selling from ETF holders. And these are, you know, I, you know, predominantly institutions or larger investors. And we've started to see an uptick here in the green of new ETF buyers, which is really good. All right, really good to see. However, it's important to note that a lot of the on-chain analysis that we're seeing is that a lot of people were selling Bitcoin profits that were, you know, from early Bitcoin buyers, all right? What you tend to see is we see these realized price and we see these weekly moving averages as support lines. Now, oh, I accidentally clicked on that. The price or realized price profitability, when we start to see the long-term buyers take profits, that's where you start to see the unwinding of the realized profit and those people, let's say you bought back at $10,000 for Bitcoin and now it's at $70, well, you're in a lot of profit, all right? And that, you know, now new foundation of that price of the next buyer is now buying at $70,000. Well, then they're not going to sell until we get up into, you know, say the $100,000, $120,000. That's a very basic way of looking at it. But essentially what happens is when you start to see these, you know, unrealized profit of Bitcoin investors start to unwind and they start to sell, it usually is bought up by new buyers. But that is essentially what happens when you start to get this rotation of capital. And that's essentially what, you know, we look at in terms of price cycles or, you know, Bitcoin cycles or crypto cycles, you get different periods of time where you are looking at the market in a different lens. So you've got accumulation, growth, bubble, and crash. All right. And, you know, I believe we're probably in that range right now of resetting back into the accumulation range. A really good, you know, a support band, I guess you would call it, or really basic way of looking at areas to start to accumulate Bitcoin is what I call the value area. Now the value area is, you know, below $70,000 at the moment. And this, these lines here are weekly moving averages. Now these weekly moving averages, uh, historically, uh, the 50-week moving average here, all right, this was a support line that we had for about nearly 3 years for Bitcoin. You can see how it touched, uh, you know, a number of times, the green that we bounced off. And when we broke through that in late last year, that's when we started to go a little bit risk-off. We knew the market was going to retrace And this is where you want to protect your capital from November until we basically dropped here below the $70,000 level. Now I started buying and did my first purchase since, you know, late last year at Bitcoin when we peaked about $63,000. If you're brand new to digital assets and Bitcoin, anywhere near this range above the 200-week moving average, right up to $70,000, I think is a really great time to be accumulating Bitcoin. Now what do I mean by accumulating Bitcoin? It's dollar cost averaging is what I usually recommend to people. You're never going to time markets perfectly. I always say to people that there's never a gentleman's entry when getting into crypto. It's very difficult to time the market perfectly. So what I like to do is take my capital and split it up into portions and invest it over a period of time, because we could be in this accumulation range here for, uh, you know, a matter of months. If we look back to, you know, previous accumulation periods, you know, we could— sometimes these ranges sit for a year, 2 years. All right, if you go right back to the previous accumulation ranges that we've had, you know, it can, it can last a period of time. So you can see here this 200-week moving average back from 2022 right to 2024. All right, there's a couple of years. And then if you go right back to, uh, this period after the 2017 bull market, we had another sort of sell-off from all-time high to all-time high was again another nearly 3 years. So it's, it's slowly reducing this accumulation period. So it's gone from 3 years to 2 years. The, the sharpness of this sell-off that we've seen could indicate that we could see a shorter accumulation period, because essentially what happened is that a huge amount of unwinding occurred late last year when we started to see, you know, global uncertainty rise with AI, the war that's going on in the Middle East. But we started to see some technical difficulties on, in October, October the 10th, where we had a huge flash crash and liquidation in October when there were some funds in the back end of crypto market makers that had a huge cascading liquidation effect that some of these cryptocurrencies dropped 70, 80% in a matter of minutes and jumped back up. And that caused a lot of uncertainty within crypto investors, and that's why there hasn't been a lot of confidence in the market just yet. Now, one of the big things that I would, you know, really, you know, continue to share and and probably make sure it's front of mind is that cryptocurrency, digital assets are a massive, massive, you know, market cap. There's thousands of different projects, tens of thousands, all right? And it's really important to differentiate Bitcoin from altcoins. That's really part of the thing that we tend to come back to here at Collective Shift and what we teach is, you know, Bitcoin is fundamentally different to, you know, altcoins. Bitcoin is digital gold. That is the asset you want to start to accumulate and have a big foundation. And then the other things around you know, Bitcoin and altcoins, stablecoins. And these are different use cases that cryptocurrency has. And the amount of stablecoins that have grown over the past 2 years have been widely introduced because of institutional investors. All right, and we saw, you know, in March of this year, 2026, the stablecoin supply growth surveying about 86% of institutional companies are now using or holding USDC compared to 68% USDT. So we're starting to see more and more institutions get into crypto, even if they're starting with stablecoins, due to the positive government policy, the Genius Act that's happening, and the favorable policy that's happening in the US. And we see this across all, you know, markets, but institutions primarily are the ones that are accumulating Bitcoin right now. A huge amount of Wall Street firms are accumulating Bitcoin on the balance sheet because they see the devaluation of cash, and that is why they're putting that cash into Bitcoin. And although the Bitcoin price is down, that is a fundamental feature, not a bug of Bitcoin. That's because so many people don't understand Bitcoin. It trades 24/7. It's the easiest to access liquidity to. And these areas are a great range to accumulate because it's the same asset that it was back at $120,000. Bitcoin is not a share. It's not valued off EBITDA multiples. It is valued off the, the first, the understanding of the asset, the the amount of capital that's invested into Bitcoin, how much it's traded, and then ultimately the sentiment of markets in general. Bitcoin was created as a hedge against the inflation and debasement of currency. And that right now is one of the scariest things. If we look at the US debt and how crazy, you know, the amount of money printing that's going on in real time occurs and the debasement of the cash that we earn as business owners, as employees, as whatever it may be. All right, look at the US debt. You know, we're nearly up to 30— well, we're past $39 trillion now. All right, absolutely crazy, absolutely crazy to see. So the macro picture is the thing that, you know, drives, you know, the markets primarily. Uh, crypto is just a part of a broader financial ecosystem. And zooming right out, you know, seeing the unfortunate things that are happening in the Middle East, all right, while this is occurring, the conflict, it's going to impact the world, it's going to impact crypto. And that gives us opportunity for those of us that have conviction in, in assets that have that have periods of uncertainty because that's where you make your money. Where I've made money in crypto is never in these periods where the market's absolutely flying. It's in these periods of accumulation ranges. When I first started in Bitcoin and crypto, I didn't have a lot of money. I was putting my entire salary into Bitcoin for 2 years here when Bitcoin was down to like $3,000, $4,000, when everyone thought it was only used for drug money. And that's conviction that you've gotta have in the asset, and that's what gives you the resilience to continue buying and accumulating. What am I doing right now? Well, the key levels that matter most are really the 200-week moving average, as I mentioned. All right, that's currently sitting at around $62,000. That's a key level that we're looking for support. The market needs to hold that. If we break below that, you know, we could be moving towards $45,000, $50,000. I would say that's lower likelihood at this point. But if we did go to those levels, I'd be, you know, heavily investing, even heavier. The $80,000, $79,000 resistance level is what we need to reclaim. And I'm waiting for us to reclaim above that for a couple of weeks before we start to get any meaningful confidence that, you know, we're going to see big upwards momentum on the market. But we've already been through, in my opinion, a lot of that maximum pain. Bitcoin's down, you know, 48%, right, from all-time highs. And we are seeing this period here of accumulation. So I think for long-term holders, this is a good time to be accumulating. Yes, we could see more downside to come, but I think over a 6-month period, getting an average buy price here is not a bad thing at all. I'm personally sitting on a lot of my capital on stablecoins at the moment, earning a yield. So I'm doing that through USDC on Syrup. All right, and looking forward, I'm really just looking for that, you know, confirmation above $79,000 before we start to get too excited. The macro is the big thing that I'm looking at to be, you know, giving us a leading indicator on when we may come out of this range. And crypto is usually the first asset class to move. All right, so don't let this drawdown, you know, build any sort of panic or frustration. Don't go all in without confirmation, and make sure you build a really good portfolio plan and structure, all right? You want to make sure that you're accumulating during ranges that, you know, giving you the best entry points. Don't go crazy on altcoins. I'm personally not adding any more capital into altcoins right now. I've got a couple of good plays that did really well for me that I'm still holding on to because I got in early. But, you know, the ultimate piece here is that for long-term investors, building and, you know, accumulating during good value ranges slowly is a, is a good strategy. Try and be logical, don't be emotional, all right? And, and start to build a long-term stack. Hopefully that's been helpful, guys. If you want to see how sophisticated investors that we help and teach are accumulating during these ranges and how that strategy works, I'll put a little link in the description below. You can check out video on the next page that just goes through a little bit more about what we do. Otherwise, thanks so much for listening. Hopefully you enjoyed the video. Leave me any feedback below on other topics you want me to create, and I'll see you on the next video. Make sure you check out some of the other ones we've been posting as well. Chat soon. See you guys.