For a market that is supposed to be on the rise, this does not appear to be the case. Sure, Bitcoin may have set two record highs this cycle, but the highs were just that Yawn softlyThe corrections were brutal. Altcoins are down 90% or more. Retail has disappeared. Even purists wonder whether this so-called Taurus cycle deserves the name at all.
This is, by many accounts, the toughest cryptocurrency bull market ever. Bitcoin has doubled in price since its 2023 lows, but the market spirit appears hollow. What happened? Altcoin Trader “Crypto Birb” He breaks it To three main reasons.
The foundations sucked the air out of the room
Wall Street didn’t just reach this cycle; I moved in and redecorated. BlackRock, Fidelity, and Goldman did not come to speculate; They have come to own the infrastructure, custodial networks, and tokenized real assets. Institutional adoption is the headline, but what it really means is extraction at scale. They’re not playing memecoins or catching airdrops. They bought the pipes, the liquidity bars, and the compliance lanes that everyone had to rent.
Like Telcoin Magazine and Fortune Magazine alike NoteHowever, institutional adoption in early 2025 was “constitutive, not speculative.” This is great for Bitcoin, and bad for the culture. As Crypto Birb commented:
“The smart money took what was valuable, and it was good for them.”
Memecoins and the collapse of meaning
If institutions professionalized the space, memes distorted it. What started as sarcasm has become the dominant narrative in 2024 and 2025. Each week brought a new “community” symbol, a new animal, a new political joke, and a new wave of Burning Bearers.
Memecoins turned cryptocurrencies into a casino with no exit doors. Symbol after symbol is pumped out on the spread alone, then disintegrated. Even industry veterans who should have known better got caught chasing the hype over substance. It was a perfect storm of self-sabotage: retail greed meets Web3 cynicism, and it’s both It crashed.
Trump, interest rates, and risk reversal
Even the overall background worked against the risks. President Trump’s trade wars and tariffs, praised by some for their protectionist policies, led to a 20% decline in stocks and drained liquidity. Combined with ever-higher interest rates, capital has become expensive, speculative flows have dried up, and risky assets like cryptocurrencies have become fixed.
Ironically, the “pro-crypto administration” ended up freezing the retail comeback. As prices rose, consumer spending slowed, and the average investor’s appetite for 100x tokens evaporated. What should have been an age of abundance turned into a test of patience.
Bitcoin is the only survivor of this bull cycle
However, amid all the wreckage, Bitcoin remains slow, steady, and sovereign. Institutional capital has consolidated its legitimacy while everything else has burned. As the encryption case of a16za reportAs it shows, Bitcoin’s strength is supported by macro forces and regulatory acceptance
This is what maturity looks like: less euphoria, less parabolic charts, and a market that finally acts like a financial system rather than a playground. But for those who came here to “surge,” it feels like punishment.
Hollow bull
This Taurus cycle is not exciting. It’s exhausting. Bitcoin’s resilience proves that cryptocurrencies can survive. But the rest of the market, its creativity, its retail energy, its unbridled optimism, was collateral damage.
Maybe this is the price of progress. Or maybe it’s a sign that we lost the script somewhere along the way, chasing the meme at the expense of the mission. As Crypto Birb says:
“We have been manipulated ourselves. This is our punishment for choosing hype over benefit.”
Either way, this upward trend will go down in history not because of its gains, but because of its lesson: Not all courses are meant to make you rich. Some of them are there to remind you why you are here.
