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The 4 year crypto cycle explains Bitcoin’s boom and bust pattern driven by halvings. Learn why it worked before and why it broke in 2025.
Author: Chirag Sharma
The cryptocurrency market has always felt different from traditional asset classes, not just because of volatility, but because of how rhythmically that volatility appears to unfold. Over time, this repeating rhythm came to be known as the 4 year crypto cycle, a framework many investors used to make sense of explosive rallies followed by long and painful downturns. Unlike equities, which are often driven by earnings and macroeconomic trends, crypto’s early cycles seemed almost programmed, predictable, and eerily consistent.
At the heart of this idea sits Bitcoin, the asset that still anchors the entire market. Since its early years, observers noticed that major bull markets tended to emerge roughly every four years, followed by sharp corrections and extended periods of consolidation. These cycles were not subtle. They were marked by phases that almost every participant remembers vividly.
What made this pattern especially compelling was its apparent connection to Bitcoin’s internal mechanics rather than external policy decisions. The market was not reacting to central banks or governments, but to code. That narrative alone gave the 4 year crypto cycle a level of credibility that few financial theories enjoy.
As the market matured, this framework became deeply embedded in investor psychology. Traders positioned themselves years in advance. Long-term holders waited patiently for post-halving expansions. Entire strategies were built around the assumption that time, more than timing, was the critical variable.
However, by 2025, cracks began to appear. The expected post-halving surge failed to materialize in the way previous cycles had conditioned the market to expect. Bitcoin ended the year red, leverage was flushed without a euphoric top, and institutional flows behaved very differently from retail-driven manias of the past. This forced a difficult but necessary question into the open.
Is the 4 year crypto cycle still a valid way to understand the market, or was it a product of crypto’s early and more naive years?
To answer that, it is necessary to go back to the very beginning and understand why this cycle existed in the first place.
The origins of the 4 year crypto cycle are inseparable from Bitcoin’s monetary design. When Bitcoin was created, its pseudonymous founder Satoshi Nakamoto embedded a fixed issuance schedule directly into the protocol. This schedule ensured that new Bitcoin would enter circulation at a decreasing rate over time, eventually capping total supply at 21 million coins.
Every 210,000 blocks, roughly once every four years, the reward miners receive for securing the network is cut in half. This event is known as the halving. In practical terms, it means fewer new coins are introduced into the market overnight, while demand dynamics remain free to fluctuate.
The halving sequence has been mechanically consistent.
This design mirrors scarcity models found in commodities like gold, where supply becomes harder to extract over time. In Bitcoin’s case, scarcity is not geological, but mathematical.
In the early years, this reduction in supply had an outsized impact. Bitcoin’s market was relatively illiquid, awareness was limited, and even small changes in supply dynamics could trigger dramatic price movements. When fewer coins were available for sale and new demand emerged, price appreciation followed aggressively.
The first halving in 2012 provided the earliest confirmation of this mechanism. Bitcoin traded near $12 before the event and went on to exceed $1,000 within a year. While adoption, media coverage, and speculation played important roles, the halving acted as the catalyst that framed the narrative. Scarcity was no longer theoretical. It was observable.
What followed was just as important as the price increase itself. Market participants began to anticipate the next halving. This anticipation created feedback loops where buying pressure appeared months before the actual supply reduction occurred. Over time, the halving evolved from a mechanical event into a psychological anchor around which expectations formed.
This is where the 4 year crypto cycle truly took shape. The market was not just responding to reduced issuance, but to the shared belief that reduced issuance would matter. That belief shaped positioning, risk-taking, and long-term conviction across cycles.
As subsequent halvings produced similar post-event rallies, skepticism gave way to acceptance. The halving was no longer viewed as a coincidence. It became the backbone of crypto market structure, influencing not just Bitcoin, but the behavior of altcoins that followed Bitcoin’s lead during expansionary phases.
Yet embedded in this success was a hidden assumption. That Bitcoin’s internal supply mechanics would always be the dominant force shaping price. As crypto grew larger, more liquid, and more intertwined with global finance, that assumption would eventually be tested.
Belief in the 4 year crypto cycle did not emerge from theory alone. It was reinforced repeatedly through lived market experience. As Bitcoin’s price history expanded, each major cycle appeared to echo the same structure, strengthening confidence that the market was following a repeatable path rather than random speculation.
The first full expression of the cycle unfolded between 2009 and 2013. Bitcoin spent its early years trading at negligible values, largely ignored outside small cryptography circles. After the 2012 halving, supply issuance dropped meaningfully while awareness increased for the first time at scale. What followed was a rapid repricing that took Bitcoin from double-digit prices to over $1,000 within a year. This move established the template. A long period of quiet accumulation, followed by an explosive expansion phase, and then a violent correction that erased the majority of gains.
The next cycle from 2013 to 2017 reinforced the pattern with greater clarity. After the 2013 peak, Bitcoin entered a prolonged bear market that lasted nearly two years, bottoming near $200 in early 2015. Sentiment during this period was overwhelmingly negative. Many declared the experiment dead. Yet beneath the surface, infrastructure improved, exchanges matured, and long-term holders accumulated quietly.
Following the 2016 halving, price appreciation resumed gradually before accelerating into a full-scale bull market in 2017. Bitcoin ultimately reached nearly $20,000, representing another multi-thousand percent move from the cycle low. This cycle added an important layer to the 4 year crypto cycle narrative. It demonstrated that altcoins did not just coexist with Bitcoin’s expansion, but amplified it. The ICO boom, fueled by speculative capital rotation, turned Bitcoin’s rally into a broader market phenomenon.
The aftermath was just as severe. By 2018, Bitcoin had lost more than 80 percent of its value, dragging the wider market into another deep winter. Once again, the pattern held. Excess was punished, leverage was wiped out, and only the strongest projects survived.
The third major confirmation arrived during the 2020 to 2021 cycle. This time, external conditions played a much larger role. The 2020 halving coincided with unprecedented global monetary expansion in response to the COVID-19 crisis. Liquidity flooded financial markets, and risk assets across the board benefited. Bitcoin was no exception.
From the March 2020 lows, Bitcoin embarked on its most institutionally visible rally to date, eventually peaking near $69,000 in late 2021. Corporate treasury allocations, the rise of decentralized finance, NFTs, and mainstream media coverage all contributed to a sense that crypto had arrived. Yet despite the new participants and narratives, the timing still aligned closely with historical expectations. Roughly 18 months after the halving, the market reached euphoria.
On-chain indicators such as the Puell Multiple and long-term holder supply dynamics appeared to support this rhythm. Even valuation models attempted to quantify the halving’s impact by linking scarcity directly to price appreciation. While these models were far from perfect, their apparent alignment with reality strengthened conviction.
Importantly, this repetition shaped behavior. Investors stopped treating rallies as random. They began to treat them as scheduled events. Capital was deployed with multi-year horizons. Risk was increased as halving dates approached. Entire market narratives revolved around which phase of the cycle crypto was currently in.
This self-awareness created a feedback loop. Because participants believed in the 4 year crypto cycle, they acted in ways that made it appear even more real. Buying before expected expansions and selling into perceived peaks reinforced price movements that matched historical expectations.
Yet there was always an underlying fragility to this confirmation. Each cycle occurred in a vastly different environment. The first was driven by novelty. The second by speculative experimentation. The third by global liquidity and institutional curiosity. What remained constant was not the cause, but the pattern itself.
As crypto grew into a trillion-dollar asset class, questions began to surface. Was the market following the halving, or were investors simply projecting meaning onto a limited data set? And more importantly, could a framework built on three major examples survive a market that was becoming increasingly intertwined with traditional finance?
While Bitcoin’s halving provided the structural backbone of the 4 year crypto cycle, it was never the only force at work. The cycles that investors remember so vividly were the result of multiple drivers aligning at the same time. When these forces reinforced each other, markets accelerated. When they diverged, cycles weakened or broke altogether.
The most powerful of these drivers has always been liquidity.
Crypto has historically thrived during periods of easy monetary conditions. Low interest rates, expanding money supply, and abundant risk capital created an environment where speculative assets could flourish. The 2020–2021 cycle made this relationship explicit. As governments and central banks injected trillions into the global economy, capital flowed aggressively into risk assets, including crypto. Bitcoin’s post-halving rally during this period was amplified not just by reduced supply, but by excess liquidity searching for returns.
When liquidity tightens, the opposite occurs. Risk appetite fades, leverage unwinds, and even structurally sound assets struggle. This reality became increasingly clear as crypto matured and began reacting more directly to macroeconomic data, interest rate expectations, and global capital flows.
Technology also played a critical role in reinforcing cycles. Each major bull market coincided with a technological or narrative breakthrough that expanded crypto’s addressable market.
As crypto expanded beyond its early adopter phase, the environment supporting the 4 year crypto cycle began to change structurally.
Institutional participation increased dramatically. Products such as spot exchange-traded funds, custodial services, and regulated derivatives tied crypto more closely to traditional financial systems. Capital flows became larger, steadier, and more sensitive to macroeconomic conditions rather than internal crypto milestones alone.
Narratives diversified. Bitcoin was no longer the sole driver of market attention. Entire sectors emerged around decentralized finance, NFTs, gaming, AI integration, and real-world asset tokenization. These narratives followed their own timelines, sometimes aligning with Bitcoin’s cycle, and sometimes diverging completely.
Regulatory frameworks matured as well. While uncertainty remained, crypto was no longer operating entirely in regulatory gray zones. Compliance requirements, reporting standards, and institutional oversight dampened the extreme speculative excesses that once defined cycle peaks.
Perhaps most importantly, the market became reflexive to a wider set of inputs. Interest rates, bond yields, dollar strength, and geopolitical risk began influencing crypto prices in ways that were largely absent in earlier cycles. Bitcoin’s halving still mattered, but it no longer operated in isolation.
A critical weakness of the 4 year crypto cycle lies in its limited data set. Prior to 2025, the model relied on effectively three full post-halving cycles. From a statistical standpoint, this is an extremely small sample size on which to base deterministic expectations.
Each cycle occurred under unique conditions. The early 2010s were defined by novelty and low liquidity. The mid-2010s by speculative experimentation. The early 2020s by unprecedented global stimulus. Treating these outcomes as repeatable laws rather than context-dependent events risks overfitting narratives to history.
As crypto matured, the assumption that past patterns would automatically repeat became increasingly fragile. The market was no longer young, illiquid, or disconnected from the global economy. It was becoming something else entirely.
The events of 2025 marked a clear departure from historical expectations. Following the 2024 halving, the market failed to deliver the euphoric expansion many anticipated. Bitcoin closed the year modestly lower, marking the first red post-halving year in its history.
Several factors converged to break the cycle.
Institutional flows absorbed supply without triggering speculative mania. Spot ETFs accumulated Bitcoin steadily, reducing volatility rather than amplifying it. Retail participation remained muted, with many participants exhausted by previous drawdowns and less willing to chase narratives.
Macro conditions also played a decisive role. Liquidity was tighter, interest rates remained restrictive, and global risk appetite was subdued. Without abundant capital to fuel speculation, halving-driven scarcity alone was insufficient to drive explosive price action.
Perhaps most telling was the absence of a blow-off top. There was no universal euphoria, no broad-based retail frenzy, and no singular narrative dominating the market. Instead, price action was fragmented, rotational, and increasingly influenced by external economic variables.
This did not signal the end of crypto’s relevance. It signaled the end of a simplistic framework
