Coinbase CEO Says Bitcoin Has Bottomed With BTC 38% Below $126K Peak

A Bottom Call Made at $78,000

Coinbase chief executive Brian Armstrong said on Thursday that bitcoin has already hit its low for this market cycle, a claim made while the asset was trading roughly 38% below its record.

“I personally think we’ve seen the bottom of the bitcoin price in this cycle. It’s going to start to trend up over the coming year or two as we reach the next halving event,” Armstrong said in a Bloomberg Television interview, The Block reported.

It is an unusually specific statement from an executive who normally talks about products, not price levels, and it landed on a day when the tape was not cooperating.

The Numbers Behind the Call

Bitcoin changed hands near $77,982 on Thursday, down about 1.3% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. That leaves it roughly 38% below the all-time high of $126,080 set on October 6, 2025.

The asset has also failed several times to reclaim $80,000, a level that has capped rallies for weeks and become the market’s most watched line.

Armstrong’s framing was more optimistic than the headline drawdown suggests. He pointed out that bitcoin had climbed 23% over the 21 trading sessions through September 9, a stretch in which the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq 100 were broadly flat.

Both things are true at once, and that ambiguity is exactly what makes bottom calls contentious.

What a Halving Actually Is

Armstrong hung his timeline on the halving, so it is worth explaining what that means for anyone new to the market.

New bitcoin enters circulation as a reward paid to miners for each block they add to the chain. That reward is halved every 210,000 blocks, which works out to roughly four years. The last halving landed on April 20, 2024, dropping the reward from 6.25 BTC to the current 3.125 BTC per block.

The next one is set for block 1,050,000 and is currently estimated for April 2028. In plain terms, the supply of new coins entering the market is halved overnight, on a schedule nobody can change.

Traders watch it because past halvings have been followed by strong price periods. With only three on record, that is a pattern rather than a rule.

ETF Money Went the Other Way This Week

Armstrong’s optimism sat awkwardly against the week’s fund flows. US spot bitcoin ETFs shed $120.2 million on Wednesday, after losing $46.6 million on Tuesday, for roughly $167 million across two sessions, Cointelegraph reported, citing Farside Investors data.

The ARK 21Shares fund led the exit at $78 million, followed by Grayscale’s trust at $27.2 million and BlackRock’s IBIT at $19.5 million.

Context matters. Those two red days followed a three-week run that pulled in $3.8 billion, the strongest stretch of 2026, against about $55 billion in cumulative net inflows since launch. Ether funds took in $34.7 million on Wednesday, and Solana funds took in $11.2 million, so the pullback was bitcoin-specific rather than a broad retreat.

Fund flows also miss a large part of the market, since investors who buy crypto online and hold it themselves never appear in these figures. A similar gap emerged when Binance’s bitcoin reserves hit a 2026 high while the price stalled, a reminder that flows and prices can diverge for weeks before one gives way.

The Yen Is the Wildcard Nobody Controls

The bigger pressure on price this week has come from currency markets rather than crypto itself.

The Japanese yen strengthened to about 153 per dollar, its firmest level since February, after US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent signaled a willingness to act in yen markets. A stronger yen squeezes the carry trade, in which investors borrow cheaply in yen to buy higher-yielding assets elsewhere.

“The carry trade is vulnerable because this unwind is happening before the BOJ has even delivered its expected hike,” Saxo Bank chief investment strategist Charu Chanana said. She added that further yen strength could turn a gradual reduction in leverage into a faster, self-reinforcing unwind.

The Bank of Japan is expected to raise rates by 0.25% on September 28. If that unwind accelerates, it could keep a lid on bitcoin regardless of where the cycle low sits, which is the risk Armstrong’s timeline has to survive.

Price Was Not Actually the Main Topic

Most of the appearance was spent arguing that stablecoins are becoming Coinbase’s centre of gravity. Armstrong said stablecoin payments on Base grew 700% year over year, projected the stablecoin market could reach $3 trillion by 2030, and named payments, tokenization, prediction markets and agentic finance as the company’s four priorities heading into 2027.

Those are forecasts from an executive with an obvious stake in them, not settled outcomes. For readers tracking the market itself rather than the commentary, crypto market prices and venue data on any best crypto exchange tend to move ahead of the interviews.

Bottom Calls Are Cheap Until They Are Tested

A cycle low can only be confirmed in hindsight, which is what makes this kind of statement hard to assess in real time. Armstrong is offering a read rather than evidence, and he is not a neutral observer, since Coinbase revenue rises when trading activity does.

What can be measured is the setup around him, and it points in three directions at once. Supply growth halves in 2028. ETF demand has been strong for three weeks and soft for two days. The macro backdrop currently argues against risk assets.

If $80,000 breaks and holds, the call starts to look early rather than wrong. If the carry-trade unwind deepens first, it becomes another confident forecast filed against a market that has spent 11 months below its peak.