Long Live the King
“Traders counting on a 2025 top will be wrong — the pattern worked before but fails this time,”
Hayes argues that monetary policy drives Bitcoin more directly than its programmed supply schedule.
The U.S. Treasury has added about $2.5 trillion in fresh liquidity through short-term bill issuance while the Federal Reserve has resumed rate cuts even with inflation above target.
Futures data from the CME Group shows a 94% probability of a cut in October and an 80% chance of another in December, clear signs of an easing liquidity regime that supports risk assets.
Across Reddit and crypto forums, “Is the four-year cycle dead?” is now the top search thread as traders acknowledge liquidity and not the calendar, as Bitcoin’s real driver.
Hayes highlights the China credit cycle as a parallel force behind Bitcoin’s trend. In previous bull runs, yuan-based credit expansion worked in tandem with U.S. stimulus to lift digital assets.
Now, Beijing is shifting from deflation to mild easing, allowing Chinese liquidity to complement rather than offset U.S. flows. That alignment, Hayes says, forms the core of a new structural regime for Bitcoin in 2025, where global money conditions override supply events.
Hayes points to three eras to illustrate the pattern:
Each cycle showed that Bitcoin halving vs. money supply was a false dichotomy and that liquidity always won. The current environment mirrors those expansions but with a new twist, that of institutional ETF inflows, open interest growth, and regulatory clarity now amplifying monetary policy’s impact.
Research from Hayes’s view. Lead analyst Vetle Lunde calls the current market a “liquidity-driven structural regime.”
He notes that Bitcoin’s new all-time high of $126,199 came as ETFs and futures added 63,083 BTC in a single week, the largest accumulation of 2025. This surge in institutional ETF inflows and open interest accumulation confirms that credit conditions; not halving events, steer the market cycle.
With President Trump pushing for looser fiscal policy and regulators encouraging lending, Hayes expects liquidity to stay abundant. Both the Federal Reserve and China’s PBOC favor lower rates and cheaper credit to sustain growth.
That alignment could extend Bitcoin’s advance into 2026, marking a cycle timed to liquidity, not to the calendar. Hayes’s core message to traders is simple and empirical: Bitcoin’s four-year cycle is dead because money itself now sets the cycle.
