The crypto token has fallen greater than 40% since its peak final fall, Bloomberg Information reported Saturday (Feb. 21), amid the rising reputation of stablecoins and prediction markets.
The value of bitcoin hit a file excessive of $126,272 in October 2025. Within the final month, its worth has tumbled from $90,000 to just a little greater than $67,000 as of Sunday (Feb. 22).
The report characterizes the battle as centering round function, somewhat than worth, noting that the decline is occurring amid a pleasant regulatory setting in Washington and powerful ranges of institutional adoption.
“The central story of bitcoin was ‘quantity go up’ and we don’t have that anymore,” Owen Lamont, portfolio supervisor at Acadian Asset Management, instructed Bloomberg. “Now we have quantity go down. That’s not an excellent story.”
We’d like to be your preferred source for news.
Please add us to your most popular sources listing so our information, information and interviews present up in your feed. Thanks!
Based on the report, one of many indicators of stablecoins’ ascendency got here in November, when CashApp mentioned it could start supporting the coins. It additionally factors to different developments signalling a shift away from bitcoin: the passage of the GENIUS Act, and the rise of expertise like tokenization and cross-border stablecoin funds, which don’t depend on bitcoin to operate.
Commercial: Scroll to Proceed
“If something, stablecoin exercise may very well be correlated with exercise on Ethereum or on different chains. And stablecoins are for funds,” mentioned Carlos Domingo, co-founder/CEO of tokenization platform Securitize. “I don’t assume anyone right now sees bitcoin as a fee mechanism.”
Writing about the way forward for cryptocurrency in 2022, PYMNTS David Evans argued that bitcoin has no means to make sure worth stability, which is important for a foreign money to have.
“A putative currency have to be moderately secure,” he wrote. “Whether it is topic to speedy depreciation individuals don’t need to obtain it for funds, and if topic to speedy appreciation individuals don’t need to spend it and thereby lose their acquire.”
Bitcoin, with its “hardwired, algorithmically pushed, provide curve … can not alter provide to make sure both that the foreign money is comparatively secure over quick intervals of time or that it inflates or deflates at a predictable charge,” he added.
And in analyzing the broader crypto economic system in 2021, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster likened beginning a coin to constructing a casino.
“Investing in them is like playing, taking part in the slots, shopping for a lottery ticket, hoping to hit the jackpot,” she wrote. “With none actual understanding of what these cash do, why they’re beneficial or what’s the use case for any of them. The place the one fundamentals for making the funding are what different principally beginner traders say on social media, and whether or not the worth is up or down on the open or shut.”
