The four-year Bitcoin cycle theory, long treated like a ‘bible’ in the global crypto market, is now being openly rejected. The one making the declaration is none other than Michael Saylor, executive chairman of Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin.
On April 4, 2026, Saylor wrote on his X account: “Bitcoin has won. The global consensus is that BTC is digital capital. The four-year cycle is over. Price is now determined by capital flows.” He went on to warn that “banks and digital credit will determine Bitcoin’s growth trajectory, and the biggest risk is bad ideas leading to harmful protocol changes.”
What is the four-year cycle theory?
Bitcoin’s four-year cycle theory stems from the halving that Satoshi Nakamoto designed into the protocol.
※ Halving: an event roughly every four years in which the Bitcoin mining reward is cut in half. It reduces new supply and increases scarcity.
Every 210,000 blocks, or roughly every four years, the block reward miners receive is cut in half. This design gradually slows the rate at which new Bitcoin is issued, a mechanism that artificially increases scarcity. Historically, Bitcoin’s price has surged within 12 to 18 months after each halving.
In 2012, the year of the first halving, Bitcoin soared from around $12 to $1,150 the following year. After the second halving in 2016, the 2017 bull market pushed it past $20,000, and after the third halving in 2020, it hit what was then an all-time high of about $69,000 in 2021. Because the pattern repeated so clearly, many traders and investors built their buying and selling strategies around the halving schedule.
But the fourth halving in 2024 was different. In January, before the April halving, the U.S. SEC approved spot Bitcoin ETFs, bringing in massive institutional money, and for the first time in history Bitcoin set a new all-time high before a halving. After peaking at $126,198 on Oct. 6, 2025, the price is now trading at about 46% of that high.
Why the four-year cycle is fading
Saylor’s declaration is persuasive not simply because of his influence. It is backed by evidence that the market structure itself has genuinely changed.
Bitcoin’s annual new supply is now only about 0.85% of the total in circulation. The block reward, which started at 50 BTC in 2009, has fallen to 3.125 BTC after four halvings, and more than 94% of the total 21 million BTC has already been mined. At this level, the real size of the supply shock a halving delivers to the market is bound to be far smaller than in the early years.
The change on the demand side is even more decisive. Since U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved in January 2024, BlackRock’s IBIT alone has come to manage more than about 773,000 BTC, making it the world’s largest spot Bitcoin ETF. The ETF complex as a whole has managed about $1.3 trillion in assets since 2024, locking roughly 6% of the world’s circulating Bitcoin inside regulated financial products. That supply has effectively been removed from the pool that retail investors could panic-sell.
The 762,099 BTC held by Strategy fits the same picture. When a single company holds about 3.6% of Bitcoin’s total supply, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the key variable moving the price is the allocation decisions of institutional capital, not retail investors’ emotions or changes in the mining reward.
What Saylor was really warning about
The key point lies in a part of Saylor’s remarks that drew relatively little attention. He stated plainly that Bitcoin’s biggest threat comes not from outside but from within, namely from misguided attempts to change the protocol.
Saylor described this by borrowing a medical term: ‘iatrogenic’ risk.
※ Iatrogenic: a medical term for when treatment itself causes side effects or a new illness. Saylor used it to mean that attempts to improve the Bitcoin protocol could end up damaging its core properties.
This connects to BIP-110, a proposal currently hotly debated in the Bitcoin developer community. BIP-110 is a soft fork proposal that would disable OP_SUCCESS opcodes in Tapscript and cap Taproot control blocks at 257 bytes, limiting on-chain data insertion by protocols such as Ordinals. Some figures, including Blockstream co-founder Adam Back, criticize the proposal for potentially hindering Layer 2 development and limiting Bitcoin’s scalability. Saylor has consistently held that ambitious attempts to ‘build a better Bitcoin’ can themselves undermine Bitcoin’s core value.
How the market is reacting
The remarks came during a downturn, with Bitcoin trading at close to half its October 2025 peak. The day before, on April 3, Saylor had urged the market to buy, calling it “a good Friday to buy Bitcoin” (it was Good Friday). Some investors read this as a buying opportunity, while other market participants remain worried about further declines.
This raises an important question. If the four-year cycle has really ended, the current decline should be read not as a ‘post-halving correction’ like those of the past, but as an ordinary correction in an institutional asset tied to macroeconomic variables. In that case, the timing of a recovery should be read not from the halving clock but from the Fed’s policy stance, ETF flows and corporate treasury strategies.
The traditional cycle theorists’ counterarguments still hold weight. Bitcoin’s history is only 16 years long, and every cycle has brought claims that “this time is different,” with mixed results each time. Some analysts see the present not as the end of a cycle but as a mid-cycle correction, leaving open the possibility of further gains between late 2026 and 2027.
BITPRESS Insight
Saylor’s declaration is not just a bull’s optimism. It is the party with the largest position in the market formally stating that Bitcoin’s market structure has fundamentally changed: that the demand variable of institutional capital flows has begun to dominate the price over the supply variable of the halving.
What this change means for investors is clear. The strategy of circling dates on a four-year calendar and waiting is losing its validity; instead, the ability to read ETF flows, the direction of the Fed’s monetary policy, and how fast major companies and countries are adopting Bitcoin has become the more important variable. Still, before taking Saylor’s argument at face value, keep in mind that he is the very person with the most to lose or gain from Bitcoin.
Sources
https://x.com/saylor/status/1908230727538622793 https://www.cryptotimes.io/2026/04/05/michael-saylor-says-bitcoin-cycle-dead-points-to-capital-flows/ https://blockeden.xyz/blog/2026/02/06/bitcoin-four-year-cycle-dead-institutional-flows-etfs-sovereign-adoption/ https://calebandbrown.com/blog/is-bitcoins-four-year-cycle-broken/ https://bitbo.io/treasuries/microstrategy/
