Bitcoin Sell-Off Might Be Over – is This the Bottom?

Bitcoin’s drop under $90,000 has split the market into two opposing camps. Some analysts insist the sell-off still has room to run — even into the $80,000 region — while others argue that the violent flush already emptied most of the weak hands.

The disagreement is loud, but Standard Chartered has taken a very clear position: the correction is nearing its endpoint.

A Decline They Believe Is Clearing the Path, Not Ending the Trend

Rather than treating the plunge as the start of a structural breakdown, Standard Chartered sees the move as a textbook liquidation washout. Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank’s head of digital asset research, says the selling pressure reflects short-term traders being forced out, not long-term capital abandoning the sector.

His reasoning traces back to ETF-era history. Since U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs launched, the market has already endured three rapid 30% corrections. Each time, once liquidations ran their course, Bitcoin didn’t fade into a bear market — it reversed sharply upward.

To Kendrick, nothing in the current decline looks different.

A Market Signal Most Retail Traders Don’t Watch

Kendrick highlights a metric that rarely gets mentioned on social media: MicroStrategy’s modified NAV ratio. When the ratio sinks toward 1.0, it has consistently lined up with exhausted selling phases. And right now, the ratio is headed directly into that territory again — one of the main reasons Standard Chartered expects the bottoming process to be close.

His base case remains unchanged: Bitcoin to recover into the end of the year.

Another Analyst Calls This a Base-Building Zone

Adding to the bullish camp — but from a completely different perspective — is market strategist Michaël van de Poppe. He acknowledges that Bitcoin did bounce recently, but warns that volatility is still elevated, meaning recovery won’t happen instantly.

Rather than expecting a straight reversal, van de Poppe sees the current region as a foundation zone. In his view, Bitcoin is likely to range sideways for a while, forming structural support before attempting another leg higher. He also believes several indicators now show that price has become overextended to the downside, implying sellers may have already gone too far.

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His expectation is not for a quick rally but for patient accumulation to outperform — historically, investors who buy during quiet base formation phases tend to see stronger long-term returns than those who wait for momentum to return and then chase the rally.

The Macro Target Still Hasn’t Been Abandoned

Despite the recent shock, Kendrick hasn’t trimmed his longer-term view. His forecast — which he has repeated for months — is that Bitcoin could finish the year at $200,000. Nothing about the volatility of the past weeks has altered that projection.

To Standard Chartered, the defining question isn’t whether Bitcoin dipped, but whether long-term capital sold during the panic. Their conclusion: it didn’t.