Crypto Founder Reveals What Will Drive Bitcoin Price To $200,000 In 2026

Bitcoin's next bull run has a target—and a timeline. A major crypto founder just laid out the exact forces that could propel the digital asset to $200,000 within the next year.

The Catalysts Are Here

Forget vague predictions. This roadmap points to concrete, converging factors already in motion. It's not about hoping for adoption; it's about institutional pipelines filling, regulatory frameworks hardening, and a supply squeeze that makes previous cycles look tame.

Institutional On-Ramps Go Live

The real money is finally arriving. Traditional finance spent years building the plumbing—the ETFs, the custody solutions, the compliance rails. That infrastructure is now operational, creating a frictionless path for capital that dwarfs anything from the 2021 rally. This isn't speculative retail FOMO; it's allocated portfolio money seeking a hard asset in an era of soft currency.

The Halving Math Gets Real

Bitcoin's code mandates scarcity. The next supply cut, baked into the protocol, will collide with this new institutional demand. Basic economics takes over: supply shock meets demand surge. Past cycles showed the pattern; this one has the players to amplify it exponentially.

A Global Macro Tailwind

Central banks haven't solved the inflation problem—they've just renamed it. As fiscal dominance trumps monetary policy, sovereign balance sheets look riskier. Bitcoin's fixed supply narrative shifts from a niche talking point to a core hedge for asset managers who've run out of traditional safe havens. It's the ultimate 'fine, I'll do it myself' move against legacy finance.

The cynical take? Wall Street always monetizes the revolution. They mocked the asset, then built the tools to own it, and will now profit most from its rise. The 2026 target isn't a moon shot; it's the logical endpoint of a financialization playbook they wrote themselves. The question isn't if the price moves, but who's already positioned to capture the gains.

Arthur Hayes Predicts Bitcoin Price Will Reach $200,000 Next Year

In his latest Substack post, Hayes declared that the bitcoin price will quickly reclaim $124,000 and rally towards $200,000 next year as the market equates the Fed’s Reserve Management Purchases (RMP) to quantitative easing (QE). The crypto founder expects the Fed’s RMP to inject significant liquidity into the market next year, sparking a parabolic BTC rally.  

The Fed had announced, following the FOMC meeting earlier this month, that it WOULD purchase Treasury bills starting December 12 and acquire up to $40 billion in Treasury bills within 30 days. However, the Fed has noted that this move doesn’t qualify, although Hayes and other market experts disagree. 

The BitMEX co-founder remarked that the current misguided belief that RMP isn’t QE in terms of credit creation, and the uncertainty about RMP’s existence post-April next year, are the reasons he expects the Bitcoin price to chop between $80,000 and $100,000 until the new year begins. 

However, the chop would end as the market equates RMP to QE, sparking the bitcoin rally to $200,000. Hayes stated that March 2026 will mark the peak in expectations for the RMP’s ability to ramp asset prices, causing BTC to decline and form a local bottom well above $124,000. 

Meanwhile, the BitMEX co-founder noted that $40 billion is great, but much less in 2025 than in 2009, based on the percentage of dollars outstanding. As such, he remarked that the market cannot expect its credit impulse at current financial asset prices to be as impactful. 

BTC Still At Risk Of Dropping To $56,000

In a report, on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant predicted that the Bitcoin price could still drop to as low as $56,000 as the market transitions into a bear market. The firm stated that the downside reference points suggest a relatively shallow bear market and that historically, bear market bottoms have aligned with the realized price, which is currently NEAR $56,000. 

Meanwhile, CryptoQuant stated that the intermediate support is expected around the $70,000 level. The firm’s bear market thesis for the Bitcoin price is premised on the fact that BTC’s demand growth has “decisively slowed.” They further revealed that the demand growth has fallen below trend since early October 2025, indicating that the bulk of this cycle’s incremental demand has already been realized. 

At the time of writing, the Bitcoin price is trading at around $88,400, up almost 2% in the last 24 hours, according to data from CoinMarketCap.