Bitcoin's 2026 outlook has become a battleground. Spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) approvals and the post-halving rally were supposed to clarify the narrative, but instead, they amplified the divide.
Forecasts for next year range anywhere from $250,000 to $10,000. That gap reveals more than disagreement over numbers — it exposes a fundamental split over whether Bitcoin (BTC) has entered a new structural phase or remains trapped in the same cyclical patterns that defined the last decade.
To understand why expectations are so widely dispersed, it helps to start with the most optimistic outlooks