Is Bitcoin Nearing a Cycle Bottom? What Dave the Wave’s Chart Is Signaling

Is the Bitcoin bottom in? It must be close, with sentiment at all-time lows. Bitcoin closed the week near $62,823, down roughly 14% over the period and more than 50% below the all-time high of around $126,200 it printed in October 2025. The headline numbers are ugly, sentiment is worse, and there is no shortage of analysts calling for lower prices still. Yet for the first time in months, a handful of long-horizon chartists are pointing to the same thing: the conditions that have historically accompanied major Bitcoin bottoms are starting to appear.

Bitcoin continues to slide, Source: BNC

The selloff itself is easy enough to explain. Spot Bitcoin ETFs bled roughly $2.4 billion in May, the worst monthly outflow of the year, while sticky inflation data and uncertainty over the Federal Reserve’s June 17 rate decision pushed investors back toward cash, bonds and a strengthening dollar. Leverage liquidations and late-May geopolitical risk added fuel. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index has collapsed into “extreme fear” in the low 20s — the kind of reading that tends to show up at capitulations rather than tops.

None of that is bullish on its own. What has changed is where price now sits on the longer-term chart.

A contrarian flags the lower growth curve

The chart drawing attention this week comes from Dave the Wave (@davthewave), the pseudonymous analyst respected on Crypto Twitter for an unusually rational, model-driven approach. His weekly Bitcoin chart shows price falling back into the lower band of his logarithmic growth curve model — the zone that, in every prior cycle, has marked the end of a correction rather than the middle of one. His own framing of the move was characteristically understated: a “secondary drop” back toward support, annotated with a measured comparison to the analogous leg down in the previous cycle.

“the secondary drop…” wrote Dave the Wave on X

It is worth being precise about what this model is and is not. Dave the Wave’s thesis, which he has outlined on The Crypto Conversation, is that Bitcoin’s entire price history fits inside a logarithmic growth curve: explosive gains early in the asset’s life that taper toward a plateau as the market matures. Each successive cycle peak is lower in percentage terms than the last, and each major bottom has historically formed near the lower bound of the curve. On his chart, that lower bound currently sits in the low-$60,000s — almost exactly where price is now trading.

Crucially, this is not a halving-cycle argument. Dave has long been a skeptic of the four-year-halving and stock-to-flow narratives, preferring a framework built on the long-term trend channel and the steady compression of volatility over time. So when his model puts price at support, it is saying something specific: relative to Bitcoin’s own multi-year growth path, this correction has now retraced about as far as previous ones did before they exhausted themselves.

The cycle-timing case — from a different camp

Separately, a different group of analysts is reaching a similar conclusion from the opposite direction. Cycle watchers note that Bitcoin’s three prior bear-market bottoms — early 2015, December 2018 and the FTX-driven low of November 2022 — each landed roughly two to two-and-a-half years after the preceding halving. The April 2024 halving places the comparable window around the middle of 2026, which is to say: now.

These same analysts point to momentum. At each of those prior bottoms, the weekly relative strength index pushed into genuinely oversold territory — not merely close to it. Proponents argue that condition has reappeared in 2026, putting Bitcoin in the same momentum regime that has historically been present while a major low was forming.

The two camps disagree sharply on why Bitcoin moves the way it does. But the convergence is the point. When a trend-channel model, a cyclical-timing argument and a momentum signal all flag the same zone independently, it deserves more attention than any one of them would alone.

Why a lower low could actually be bullish

The most interesting part of the setup may still be ahead. The level chartists are watching is the early-2026 low; Bitcoin briefly traded near $60,000 in February before clawing back above $70,000. If price now undercuts that low while momentum holds above its earlier reading, the result would be a textbook bullish divergence on the weekly timeframe — price making a lower low while momentum makes a higher low.

In plain terms, the selling would be losing force even as the price tags a fresh bottom. That is precisely the pattern that formed near the FTX low in late 2022, and divergences of that kind tend to appear at the end of major downtrends rather than in their middle. It is the reason some analysts now argue the most constructive scenario is not an immediate bounce but one more flush lower — a final shakeout that completes the divergence and clears out the last leveraged sellers.

That framing matters for expectations. Bottoms are processes, not single candles. The 2015, 2018 and 2022 lows were each followed by months of grinding, sideways price action before the next sustained advance began — the slow transfer of coins from weak hands to strong ones. Anyone treating an oversold reading or a touch of the growth curve as a precise buy signal is likely to be early, and possibly frustrated for some time.

The other side of the ledger

The bear case is not subtle, and it is largely structural. ETF outflows have been relentless, with a multi-week withdrawal streak through late May. Whale wallets have been distributing into the weakness even as smaller retail addresses accumulate — historically a bearish configuration. A large overhang of Mt. Gox creditor Bitcoin still carries a repayment deadline later in 2026, keeping a known block of potential supply on the table for months.

The market is also pricing real downside. On prediction platform Polymarket, traders this week assigned meaningful probability to Bitcoin tagging the mid-to-high $50,000s within the month, even as the majority still expect support to hold around $65,000. And the immediate catalysts are macro, not crypto-native: the June 6 US jobs report and the Fed’s June 17 decision could easily override any technical setup in the short term. A hawkish surprise would put the February lows squarely back in play.

Bottom line

The trend remains down. The chart still looks ugly, and the macro backdrop offers little comfort. None of the signals discussed here guarantees a bottom — markets do not offer guarantees, and the most likely path may well involve more pain before any durable low is in.

But the weight of evidence is shifting. Dave the Wave’s growth-curve model, the cyclical-timing window and the momentum picture are, for the first time in months, pointing in the same direction. For investors trying to work out whether Bitcoin is in the early innings of this correction or the later ones, that convergence is the most compelling tell to emerge in some time.