Assessing where Bitcoin’s cycle top lies – Is $160K on the cards?
- The greedy sentiment prevalent in the market despite the recent pullback was not a cause for concern
- The Bitcoin Price Temperature showed that the price of BTC is likely to push beyond $160k
Bitcoin [BTC] was trading at $95.1k at press time. On the 7th of January, it fell 5.2% from $102.2k to $96.9k. This happened on the back of “better-than-expected” U.S. Economic Report.
A look at the crypto fear and greed index showed that the market sentiment was still greedy. With BTC struggling to reclaim the $100k level, was this an early warning that investors should sell and exit the market?
Using indicators and metrics to time the Bitcoin top
It is hard to quantify when a crypto cycle’s top has arrived. A well-known indicator is the Bitcoin Rainbow Chart. Another is the Pi Cycle Top indicator.
This indicator uses the 111-day and a multiple of the 365-day moving averages. Their bullish crossover would mark the cycle top.
Meanwhile, the 150-day moving average and a multiple of the 471-day moving average is used to find the cycle bottom. A deeper explanation can be found here.
Some popular BTC top indicators are CryptoQuant’s NVT Golden Cross or the Puell Multiple. Many of these top signals involve on-chain metrics.
For example, Puell Multiple uses the ratio of daily to yearly coin issuance to find buy and sell regions.
Created by crypto analyst Axel Adler, the Bitcoin Price Temperature metric uses the 4-year moving average.
It is an oscillator that models the number of standard deviations by which the Bitcoin price has deviated from the 4-year moving average.
From the chart, above, it can be seen that the price (black) is barely above the 4-year MA plus 2 sigma (or two standard deviations from the 4-year MA).
In the past, a bull run was considered to be heating up and near the top when the price was six standard deviations above the moving average.
Read Bitcoin’s [BTC] Price Prediction 2025-26
At press time, 4-year MA plus 6 sigma was at $158k. Hence, Bitcoin nowhere close to a cycle top.
Additionally, if the BPT would prove right once again, then we can expect BTC to reach at least $158k and push higher before the market can be considered “heating up”.