Bitcoin (BTC) has changed a lot in four years, distancing from shaded centralized entities such as FTX and emerging as Plat Du Jour among institutional investors. However, this month back to six figures in the midst of cooling rates tensions is presenting a series of warning signals that seem disturbingly similar to the maximum of the 2021 cycle.
In 2021, Bitcoin reached a historical record in April of $ 65,000, coinciding with a burst of Michael Saylor’s microstrategic activity (then named) and the OPI of Coinbase (Coin). The emotion was capitalized by the cunning merchants, who shortened the great news and went down to BTC to an eventual end to $ 28,000 only two months later.
Then, when the entire industry began to prepare for a sustained bearish market or even for the end of Bitcoin (remember the Chinese mining ban), BTC turned the tail and began a rally that did not stop for four months. This relentless increase resulted in a new record record of $ 69,000, despite all the metrics in the chain that point towards a bassist result.
Ominely, the current price action this time is accompanying the same metrics in the chain that tells a similar story about a potential double top.
A deeper immersion
The first of these metrics is weekly RSI, which exhibits three bearish divergence strikes since March 2024, December 2024 and May 2025. The RSI is an indicator that compares average gains with average losses during an established period to measure potentially excessive or excess sales conditions. The bearish divergence is where RSI is in a tendency towards disadvantage, while the price is in the upward trend.
This, together with the commercial volumes that are lower compared to the initial movement above $ 100K, suggests that the impulse of this highest swing is decreasing. The volumes have fallen into cryptographic and institutional places, with a volume in CME BTC futures that do not exceed 35,000 contracts for three of the previous four weeks. The initial movement saw that the volumes regularly exceed 65,000 contracts, reaching more than 85,000 three times. A contract in the CME is worth 5 bitcoin ($ 514,000).
As in 2021, the open interest is also diverging from the price action, currently an open interest 13% lower than the initial unit at $ 109K in January, while the price is only 5.8% lower. Four years ago, when Bitcoin reached $ 69,000, the open interest was 15.6% lower than the initial maximum of $ 65,000 despite the fact that the price is 6.6% higher.
What does this mean?
The similarities with 2021 are clear, but it is worth noting that the structure of the encryption market is completely different from four years ago. Mainly thanks to Michael Saylor’s strategy and a growing number of corporate imitators, increasing BTC acquisitions at any cost, the presence of institutional interest is much greater in this cycle. There is also the ETF element of Bitcoin Spot, which allows intuitive investors and companies to acquire BTC in a traditional regulated place.
As learned in 2021, chain metrics can be an inaccurate measure of prognostic price action. It is feasible that BTC breaks a new record after Trump inevitably reveals the details of a US Bitcoin Treasury. UU., But that could also become a “news event”, in which merchants try to capitalize on the emotional purchase of uninformed retail investors.
What the indicators suggest is that, although a new record record could be formed as in 2021, the impulse of this movement is to decrease and the analysts who are boldly asking $ 150K or even price objectives of $ 200K could be in a rude awakening once the sale of sales really begins. Bitcoin entered more than one a year bearish market at the end of 2021, which resulted in substantial dismissals throughout the industry and the implosion of several commercial companies, centralized loan companies and Defi protocols.
This time, the market has several other elements to consider whether prices begin to fall. In particular, MSTR leveraged BTC position, the BTC Defi emerging industry that has $ 6.3 billion in total locked value (TVL), and the billions of sparkling dollars that bounce around the memecoin ecosystem, which is known to hire disproportionately in times of pressure on the market of market pressure
