The forgotten bitcoin bull trade.
While the S&P 500 (^GSPC) has climbed to fresh records above 7,000 this month, bitcoin has done anything but regain the upward momentum that thrust the digital asset to a record high above $122,000 in October 2025.
A new survey of 3,400 global consumers by Deutsche Bank may help explain why the cryptocurrency is stuck in neutral. Investors just don’t believe 2026 will be the return of bitcoin price mania.
In the US, 19% believe bitcoin’s price will be between $20,000 and $60,000 to end 2026. Notably, in the US, 13% think bitcoin’s price will land below $20,000 in 2026.
For perspective, bitcoin prices currently stand at $77,000.
The Deutsche Bank team said, “The majority expect bitcoin to be lower than today, and very little anticipate a return to the $120K record again.”
Bitcoin prices haven’t moved much over the past month as the bulls pushed the broader stock market to new highs.
While the price of bitcoin is up roughly 7.7% in the past 30 days, the gains are precarious. The digital asset spent the better part of late March and early April trading below the $70,000 mark. The price is up only 18% from the February lows.
The primary reason bitcoin isn’t hitting new highs alongside the S&P 500 is a fundamental divergence in risk appetite.
While the stock market has been boosted by strong corporate earnings and a war-is-normal attitude on Wall Street, bitcoin is currently behaving more like a high-beta risk asset than a safe haven. Investors are returning to tried-and-true trades in the tech sector like Nvidia (NVDA) as Iran conflict fears simmer down a touch.
Wall Street remains bearish on bitcoin at the moment.
A new research paper from Google this month has also cast a cloud over bitcoin.
In its paper, Google Quantum AI described a hypothetical 500,000-qubit quantum computer capable of cracking bitcoin’s elliptic-curve cryptography in under nine minutes. Although this hardware does not exist at the moment, the findings have advanced talk among cryptocurrency firms and developers about keeping bitcoin quantum-resistant.
