Bitcoin price keeps dropping despite Strategy spending billions on BTC

The price of the biggest cryptocurrency, bitcoin (BTC), is still looking for a bottom, despite major investors pouring billions into the market, while some traditional sector analysts are going for doom-and-gloom forecasts.

At the time of writing, BTC trades near $87,000 and is up 1% on the day, but down 6% on the week, increasing its annual loss to 19%. It has also been outperformed by traditional assets, such as gold and top stock market indices, this year.

The latest leg down from almost $90,000 to below $86,000 happened on Monday, when Strategy, a US-based software company and the holder of the largest corporate BTC portfolio, announced it spent nearly $1 billion on BTC for a second week in a row, increasing its BTC stash to 671,268 BTC ($58 billion).

Moreover, Strategy is not the sole major institutional or private investor that is scooping up bitcoin at a discount. For example, per market data platform Glassnode's data, over the past week, major BTC investors with holdings between 100 and 1,000 BTC bought more than 54,000 BTC ($4.7 billion). However, at the same time, long-term BTC holders sold over 137,000 BTC ($11.9 billion), according to BTC market analyst James Van Straten.

Long-term BTC holders divesting their portfolios has been one of the main themes this year. This has also been explained by the fact that these investors have finally found large buyers in the form of institutions, which has allowed them to sell their portfolios without substantially crashing the price of BTC.

In either case, while, according to Glassnode, "market conditions have stabilized, and expectations for extreme moves have moderated," forecasts of what comes next now span a wide range.

For example, trading veteran Peter Brandt suggested that if BTC repeats previous patterns, its price might now drop to almost $25,000, while some other traditional analysts even see $10,000 coming.

However, this is based on a small set of examples, while the BTC market is considered to have changed substantially, including the demise of the four-year cycle legend, according to which the price of bitcoin should be up this year, while the bear market was "scheduled" for 2026. With all the BTC adoption underway, the arrival of major institutional investors and traders, and the growth of BTC exchange-traded funds (ETFs), the market is substantially different.

At the moment, there is no clear agreement on where the market is heading next in the coming months or over the whole year. For example, in its 2026 outlook, major European digital asset manager CoinShares laid out three scenarios for BTC next, ranging from a price drop to $70,000 to a rally above $170,000, depending on how macro conditions play out.

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