The current crypto drawdown is not a four-year cycle breakdown — it's the post-quantitative-tightening normalization that played out identically in 2019, and one analyst says he called it in January. The altcoin market cap (ex-BTC, ex-stables) has broken below its major lower trend line, sitting near $700B after wicking to $586B, down 56% from the 2021 all-time high. Bitcoin wicked to the 200-week moving average around $60K before consolidating, still below the 50-week moving average.
The thesis: QT that began in 2022 and ran until December 2025 was record-breaking in duration and scale, suppressing PMI and liquidity for years longer than the 2018-2019 cycle. Post-2019 QT, altcoins were still down 75% before the recovery pump — today's 56% drawdown is actually shallower at the equivalent stage, though the waiting period has been far longer.
The near-term technical watch is whether…
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