"This selloff isn’t a bull-market pullback but a bear market…Bitcoin treasury firms have reshaped market structure"

A claim has emerged that current market conditions are clearly a bear market rather than a bull-market correction, and that Bitcoin treasury firms bear a significant share of the responsibility.

On the 2nd (local time), Julio Moreno, head of research at CryptoQuant, wrote on X: “If you had to name who’s responsible for this bear market, it’s the treasury firms,” adding, “They absorbed and distorted real spot Bitcoin demand, and ultimately destroyed that demand.” The critique is that as companies aggressively incorporated Bitcoin into their treasury strategies, they boosted demand in the short term but later left the market structure more fragile.

Moreno has previously characterized the market as a “bear market” since early November last year. At the time, Bitcoin was trading around $100,000 and, by some indicators, was nearing $110,000, yet he warned that “indicators used to find bottoms in a bull market are meaningless in the current phase.”

Moreno stressed in particular: “After a new downswing begins, you shouldn’t try to find the bottom,” adding, “Bear-market bottoms form over several months.” In other words, rushed attempts to buy the dip based on short-term rebounds or technical signals could be risky.

In the market, as large-scale liquidations have coincided with valuation losses on holdings at companies and institutions, the view is increasingly gaining traction that—consistent with Moreno’s warning—the market may be entering a structural adjustment phase.