In a global investor survey from Coinbase Institutional and Glassnode, 1 in 4 institutions agreed that crypto has now entered a bear market. Yet the majority of institutions still said Bitcoin was undervalued, and most said they had held or increased exposure since October.<\/p>\n
That discrepancy matters because it captures how institutions are positioning right now: caution about the regime, a willingness to stay allocated, and a preference for concentrating risk in Bitcoin rather than in smaller, more volatile tokens that can unwind quickly when leverage comes out.<\/p>\n
A bear market label, a value bid<\/h2>\n
The report\u2019s market framing explains why the paradox exists.<\/p>\n
October\u2019s deleveraging did real damage to altcoin price action, but Bitcoin dominance barely moved, edging from 58% to 59% in the fourth quarter of 2025.<\/p>\n
That stability matters because it shows the selling wasn\u2019t evenly distributed. It was a washout in the long tail more than a broad rejection of crypto, with Bitcoin acting like the asset you keep when you\u2019re cutting risk but not exiting the category.<\/p>\n
David Duong, Coinbase Institutional\u2019s global head of research, offered a clean way to reconcile the \u201cbear market\u201d language with \u201cundervalued\u201d conviction in an interview for CryptoSlate<\/em>.<\/p>\n His point was that institutions often use cycle labels to describe regime and positioning, while \u201cvalue\u201d is a longer-horizon assessment tied to adoption, scarcity, structure, and the policy backdrop.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen institutions assess Bitcoin\u2019s value, they look beyond near-term price action to factors such as adoption, scarcity, improving market structure, and clearer regulatory frameworks.<\/p>\n Historically, bear markets often signal periods of tighter liquidity and weaker sentiment that ultimately lay the foundation for renewed institutional participation and future growth.<\/p>\n In other words, when an investor calls this a bear market (and that\u2019s not our view, by the way), they\u2019re describing the phase of the cycle and prevailing risk appetite.<\/p>\n Positioning may be defensive, liquidity is selective, and price action might either be trending lower or chopping with a negative skew.<\/p>\n They\u2019re talking about the regime we\u2019re trading in right now, not where they think Bitcoin should ultimately settle.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The report\u2019s own data lines up with that interpretation. It shows a market that has stopped rewarding indiscriminate risk-taking but hasn\u2019t lost the bid for the largest assets.<\/p>\n Coinbase and Glassnode say perpetual futures were hit hardest, with their systematic leverage ratio falling to 3% of the total crypto market cap (excluding stablecoins).<\/p>\n At the same time, options open interest spiked as traders rushed to defend against further price weakness.<\/p>\n As an institution, if your instinct is that it\u2019s a bear market, you buy insurance, reduce liquidation risk, and keep the exposure you still want through vehicles that won\u2019t force you out at the worst possible time.<\/p>\n Jan 18, 2026<\/span> \u00b7<\/span> Andjela Radmilac<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n The easiest mistake to make here is to treat \u201cundervalued\u201d as a single valuation model that everyone shares.<\/p>\n In practice, both the report and Duong describe a bundle of assumptions that looks more like market structure than a neat discounted cash flow argument.<\/p>\n Start with what changed in derivatives.<\/p>\n The report says BTC options OI has overtaken perpetual futures OI, with the 25-delta put-call skew in positive territory across 30-day, 90-day, and 180-day expiries, and that doesn\u2019t happen in a market that\u2019s trying to maximize upside through leverage.<\/p>\n It happens in a market that\u2019s willing to stay long, but determined to define risk.<\/p>\n Duong described the same migration to options when asked what institutions did after October\u2019s liquidation reset:<\/p>\n \u201cInstitutional interest in expanding on-chain remained after the October reset, but in a measured, multi-venue way.<\/p>\n Moreover, institutions increasingly expressed views via options and basis trades, which give convexity or carry without the same liquidation risk that drove the October move.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That last line is the key, and it shows that institutions changed how they take exposure.<\/p>\n Options and basis trades aren\u2019t headline-making strategies, but they are how a professional book stays in the game when the regime punishes overextension.<\/p>\n On-chain data is telling the same story.<\/p>\n Coinbase and Glassnode say sentiment, as measured by entity-adjusted NUPL, deteriorated from Belief to Anxiety in October and stayed there through the quarter. While that\u2019s certainly not euphoric, it isn\u2019t capitulation either.<\/p>\n The drop in entity-adjusted NUPL shows the market stopped paying you for optimism, but is still hanging around. This interpretation fits a world where investors can be wary about the current phase while still seeing the asset as cheap relative to where they think the equilibrium sits.<\/p>\n The report also notes that, in the fourth quarter of 2025, BTC that moved within three months rose by 37%, while BTC that remained unmoved for more than a year fell by 2%, which the authors interpret as a distribution phase late in 2025.<\/p>\n If you want to take the institutional viewpoint seriously, distribution doesn\u2019t have to be a death sentence. It can mean large holders de-risked into strength, and the market is now trying to find the next set of hands that will own supply without needing a constant liquidity drip.<\/p>\n This is where the claim about Bitcoin being \u201cundervalued\u201d stops being about a single fair-value number and starts being about the belief that Bitcoin has become the only asset in crypto that can absorb capital in size without needing a retail bid to hold the structure together.<\/p>\n Duong explicitly separated Bitcoin\u2019s underwriting framework from the rest of the crypto market:<\/p>\n \u201cUnlike retail participants, who often focus on short-term price movements and market cycles, institutions place less emphasis on timing and more on Bitcoin\u2019s long-term value proposition.<\/p>\n In this context, Bitcoin is increasingly treated as a strategic, store-of-value asset and macro hedge, rather than a speculative token within the broader crypto universe.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n That maps onto what the report says about large-caps versus small-caps.<\/p>\n Their topline view for the first quarter of 2026 favors larger-cap tokens, with smaller caps still dealing with October\u2019s aftermath.<\/p>\n 5-minute digest<\/span> 100k+ readers<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n Whoops, looks like there was a problem. Please try again.<\/span><\/p>\n You\u2019re subscribed. Welcome aboard.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Given this, seeing Bitcoin as \u201cundervalued\u201d may be less about it being cheap in isolation and more about it being the only crypto asset that institutions can treat as a durable allocation when the regime is unfriendly.<\/p>\n Jan 12, 2026<\/span> \u00b7<\/span> Andjela Radmilac<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n The second pillar of the paradox is the time horizon.<\/p>\n Calling something a bear market is usually a shorter-window judgment, while calling something undervalued is often a longer-window judgment. The bridge between them is whether institutions still believe the market is ruled by a four-year clock, or whether they have moved toward a macro framework where liquidity, rates, and policy do most of the work.<\/p>\n Duong\u2019s view is that the four-year cycle still exists as a behavioral reference point, but institutions don\u2019t treat it as a hard model.<\/p>\n He argued that the halving has less power for institutions once you control for the macro variables that drive all risk assets:<\/p>\n \u201cIn our conversations with these entities, the four-year cycle is still a reference point, but mostly as a behavioral template rather than a hard model.<\/p>\n They\u2019ll look at where we are relative to prior cycle lows\/highs, halving dates, and typical drawdown\/recovery patterns, because those levels matter for positioning and sentiment.<\/p>\n That said, the evidence that halvings causally drive each cycle is weak: we only have four observations, and they\u2019re heavily confounded by big macro and policy shifts (QE, COVID stimulus, etc.).<\/p>\n In our 2026 Outlook, we explicitly argue the economic relevance of the halving is somewhat specious once you control for liquidity, rates, and dollar dynamics.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The report points to December CPI holding at 2.7%, and cites the Atlanta Fed GDPNow projecting 5.3% real GDP growth for the fourth quarter of 2025. It outlines a base case where the Fed delivers the two rate cuts (50 bps total) priced into fed funds futures, which the authors view as a tailwind for risk assets.<\/p>\n They also flag a cooling jobs market, with 584,000 jobs added in 2025 versus 2 million in 2024, and they name AI adoption as one driver of that moderation.<\/p>\n You don\u2019t need to buy every macro inference to see what\u2019s happening: the institutional view of Bitcoin being \u201cundervalued\u201d is built on a macro-and-liquidity scaffold rather than a pure crypto-cycle scaffold.<\/p>\n The report\u2019s liquidity section makes that explicit with a custom Global M2 index that Coinbase says leads Bitcoin by 110 days and shows a 0.9 correlation with BTC\u2019s moves across many look-back windows. If you accept that framing, the paradox becomes easier to understand.<\/p>\n You can look at the regime, see the scars from October, see a market that still wants downside protection, and still conclude that Bitcoin sits in a favorable long-duration setup if policy and liquidity do what you expect them to do.<\/p>\n Only then does \u201cbear market\u201d become a description of how the market behaves today, and \u201cundervalued\u201d becomes a statement about how that market reprices once the macro inputs turn more supportive.<\/p>\n So what would break this thesis?<\/p>\n Duong rejected the idea that a routine pullback would be enough and instead pointed to a cluster of macro and on-chain conditions that would have to fail together:<\/p>\n \u201cInstitutions aren\u2019t anchoring on price alone, they\u2019re anchoring on macro liquidity conditions and onchain market structure.<\/p>\n The clearest signal that they might be wrong wouldn\u2019t be a routine pullback, but a breakdown in the fundamental drivers of that thesis.<\/p>\n In other words, it wouldn\u2019t be one signal alone, but it would have to be a cluster of signals.<\/p>\n For example, if macro liquidity conditions were to turn decisively against risk assets, if onchain accumulation metrics were to reverse, if long-term holders were distributing into weakness, and if institutional demand indicators were to trend persistently negative, that combination might meaningfully challenge the view that Bitcoin is undervalued or structurally supported at present.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n The survey numbers suggest institutions are split on what phase the market is in, but aligned on Bitcoin\u2019s relative appeal.<\/p>\n The report\u2019s charts show how that belief expresses itself in real positioning: less reliance on fragile leverage, more use of options for defined risk, and a market that has cooled without fully breaking.<\/p>\n Duong\u2019s answers add connective tissue to this thesis that shows \u201cundervalued\u201d is a framework anchored to liquidity, structure, and time horizon, not a vibe check of the market.<\/p>\n Whether institutions end up right depends less on winning a short-term argument about cycle labels and more on whether that framework holds together when the next macro test arrives.<\/p>\n Analysis,Bear Market,Featured,Macro,Market,bear market,bitcoin,bitcoin valuation,BTC,coinbase institutional,institutional adoption,institutions,liquiditybear market,bitcoin,bitcoin valuation,BTC,coinbase institutional,institutional adoption,institutions,liquidity#Institutions #call #bear #market #Bitcoin #undervalued1769953537<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" In a global investor survey from Coinbase Institutional and Glassnode, 1 in 4 institutions agreed that crypto has now entered a bear market. Yet the majority of institutions still said Bitcoin was undervalued, and most said they had held or increased exposure since October. That discrepancy matters because it captures how institutions are positioning right<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6236,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[192,2056,91,2057,285,2060,2058,2059,862,208,43,2061],"class_list":{"0":"post-6235","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ethereum","8":"tag-bear","9":"tag-bear-market","10":"tag-bitcoin","11":"tag-bitcoin-valuation","12":"tag-btc","13":"tag-call","14":"tag-coinbase-institutional","15":"tag-institutional-adoption","16":"tag-institutions","17":"tag-liquidity","18":"tag-market","19":"tag-undervalued"},"yoast_head":"\n\n
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<\/div>\nBitcoin options just overtook futures for the first time, and the new way institutions hedge is trapping retail leverage<\/h3>\n
From perps to protection<\/h2>\n
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Daily signals, zero noise.<\/h3>\n
![\"Bitcoin](\"https:\/\/cryptoslate.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/bitcoin-4year-cycle--1024x538.jpg\")
<\/div>\nBitcoin is being hijacked by three \u201cboring\u201d institutional dials that are overpowering the halving’s supply shock<\/h3>\n
Liquidity is the real cycle<\/h2>\n
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