Bloomberg Intelligence Senior Financial Strategist Mike McGlone said that Bitcoin could still return to the $10,000 area and believes that the crypto remains in a broader macro context of deflationary pressures, excessive risk assets and what he described as an excess in the association complex.
In an interview with EllioTrades, McGlone repeated the call he first made when bitcoin was above $100,000: the market could “break zero” again. This time, he framed the thesis less as a pure prediction of the crypto cycle and more as a macro view of what happens when speculative assets move together.
A treatise for $10,000 Bitcoin
McGlone’s main argument was that bitcoin no longer trades as a segregated alternative asset. In his statement, it is included in the same cross-border risk regime as stocks, commodities and broader liquidity conditions. “Bitcoin was one in 2009 and now there are 37 million cryptocurrencies,” he said. “Bitcoin was one. The supply was so limited. But that space led to an increase in risk assets … Now they’re taking a lower path.”
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He linked this view to what he sees as a phase of post-inflation deflation, with bond markets, rather than crypto, likely to be the next relative winners. McGlone said the sharp movement in energy, metals and crypto volatility has yet to fully hit stocks, but that is expected to change. His main case is that stock market volatility is rising from so far subdued levels, fueling a deeper correction in both stocks and digital assets.
This, in turn, supports his bitcoin goal. McGlone said he doesn’t identify $10,000 as a definitive period low as the most important long-term trading zone in the asset’s history since 2019-2020. “If you look at the highest price spread in Bitcoin since 2020, maybe even going into 2019, it’s 10,000 or less and has a history of swings around 10,000,” he said. “So my guess is we’re going to get back to that level.”
The strategist was especially candid about the rest of the sector. He argued that stablecoins are the only clear structural winners within crypto because they track “something physical,” namely the dollar and Treasury collateral. Everything else, he suggested, depends largely on presumptive belief. He pointed to the massive growth of Tether and the wider supply of crypto-dollars as evidence that the underlying ecosystem is driving demand for dollars, not the value of volatile tokens.
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McGlone also said that the projected surplus of 2024 and 2025, fueled by memecoins, ETFs and the post-election enthusiasm surrounding Donald Trump, could represent a sustained upside for the broader asset class. “The bottom line is that these risky assets should prove me wrong,” he said. “Otherwise, I see us navigating and riding a bear market in stocks, a bull market in volatility that’s barely starting.”
EllioTrades pushed back on both the magnitude of Bitcoin’s bellwether and the idea that crypto is effectively “dead,” arguing that Bitcoin can still reestablish itself as a bullish currency, and that agency trading based on stablecoins, privacy use cases, and the post-washing class of salvaged projects could support a future recovery. He also stated that while many tokens may still go to zero, the rest of the tokens in the market may follow a familiar pattern of purges and revivals seen in previous cycles.
McGlone did not rule out that crypto will eventually find a bottom. But his message was that the market doesn’t exist yet. For now, he said, bitcoin and the broader complex are behaving as risk assets in a bearish phase, and until stocks effectively correct and turn lower for a while, rallies should be treated with caution, not as evidence of a cycle reversal.
At press time, Bitcoin was $69,890.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
