Bitcoin's 2026 Bottom Hunt Has a Familiar Shape — and One New Wrinkle
The 2026 drawdown is replaying a familiar script around Strategy's stock, but options markets and miner signals suggest the cycle's tail is still being written.
Spot bitcoin set fresh 2026 lows on 25 June, dragging the largest corporate holder's equity with it and reigniting a debate that has played out, in roughly the same shape, at every cycle turn since 2022: is the worst over, or is the floor still a moving target? Bitcoin's trek into new year-to-date lows continued into 25 June, with spot BTC ETF outflows, a bearish monthly options expiry and Strategy's widening unrealized losses combining to push the asset further out of step with AI-linked equity benchmarks, according to Cointelegraph reporting on 25 June 2026 at 21:02 UTC.
The drawdown is not a surprise in isolation. It is the third leg of a tightening range that has held since the spring, and the same cast of indicators — ETF flows, derivatives skew, the corporate treasurer's equity — is doing the talking. The question is no longer whether the cycle has rolled over; it is whether the indicators that marked prior bottoms are flashing with the same intensity, or whether 2026 has introduced a structural variable that the old playbook does not price in.
The Strategy tell
For three cycles, the most-watched single indicator among buy-and-hold bitcoiners has not been the hash rate, the funding rate, or the fear-and-greed index. It is the ratio of Strategy's share price to the net asset value of the bitcoin on its balance sheet — what traders call mNAV. An early bitcoin miner told CoinDesk on 25 June 2026 at 14:39 UTC that Strategy's mNAV has fallen to roughly 0.72, near the level that marked the last cycle's turn, and that bitcoin historically bottoms about six months after that signal fires.
The mechanic is simple. When mNAV sits above 1, the equity trades at a premium to the bitcoin it holds, and the company can issue shares to acquire more coin. When mNAV sits below 1, the equity is a discount to the underlying, every share issuance is value-destructive, and the company's primary growth lever jams. The 0.72 print is not the deepest mNAV has ever been, but it is the deepest in this cycle, and it has historically been the zone where forced selling by quasi-passive holders gives way to opportunistic accumulation by long-horizon buyers.
If the six-month lag holds, the implied bottom window is late 2026 to early 2027. That is a useful calendar marker; it is not a forecast.
What the options market is actually pricing
Derivatives traders are paying for protection, not for catastrophe. Anchorage Digital's analysis on 25 June 2026 at 20:10 UTC found that bitcoin options traders remain defensive as near-term uncertainty persists, with persistent downside hedging in the front months. But the same desk noted that markets are not pricing an extreme downside scenario for Strategy, the single equity most exposed to a deeper bitcoin drawdown.
The combination is informative. It says traders believe the probability of another leg down is non-trivial — high enough to justify paying premium for puts — but not high enough to bet the company on a forced liquidation. In options language, the skew is steep, but the tail is not fat. That is closer to a late-cycle defensive posture than to a 2022-style capitulation, when mNAV compressed below 0.5 and credit spreads on Strategy's convertible debt blew out.
The bearish monthly options expiry flagged in the Cointelegraph note amplified the move but did not, on the evidence available, change the structural read. Monthly expiries concentrate gamma and force dealers to hedge, which is what makes them volatile; they do not, by themselves, set the direction.
The AI-equity decoupling
The new wrinkle in 2026 is the gap between bitcoin's performance and the AI-connected equity complex that has done much of the heavy lifting in US risk assets this year. Through the second quarter, the AI trade absorbed the marginal dollar that might otherwise have rotated into scarce digital assets, and the correlation between spot BTC and the Mag-7 basket turned negative on a six-month basis for stretches of May and June, according to price action referenced in the 25 June Cointelegraph market wrap.
That decoupling is uncomfortable for a market that spent two cycles trading as a high-beta proxy for the Nasdaq. It is also a structural break with the 2020–2024 regime, when bitcoin and growth equities rose and fell on the same liquidity tide. If the AI complex is now the marginal buyer of US-listed risk and bitcoin is not, then the macro variable that used to lift both is lifting one of them, and the old playbook of "when the Nasdaq rolls over, bitcoin rolls over harder" may be running in the wrong direction.
What remains uncertain
The six-month mNAV lag is a two-data-point regularity — the 2022 and 2018 troughs — and two observations are not a model. The AI-equity decoupling is a 2026 phenomenon with no prior analogue. The options market is paying for insurance, not for a forecast. A serious read of the evidence has to acknowledge that the indicators are pointing in roughly the same direction — late 2026 to early 2027 for a tradable bottom, with Strategy's mNAV as the cleanest single signal — without claiming that the path is mechanical.
What is harder to dismiss is the pattern itself. The corporate balance sheet, the derivatives complex and the spot flows are all telling the same story: this is a late-stage drawdown, not a regime change. Whether that story ends with a sharp reversal or a longer grind is the question the next two quarters will answer.
Monexus framed this as a market-structure story rather than a price story. The wire treatment focused on the 25 June low print and the options expiry; the structural read sits in the interaction between Strategy's mNAV, the AI-equity decoupling, and the derivatives skew.