CryptoQuant Founder: The Cost for BTC to Double Has Increased 20,000 Times, Where Does the $100 Billion Buy Pressure Come From?
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CryptoQuant Founder: The Cost for BTC to Double Has Increased 20,000 Times, Where Does the $100 Billion Buy Pressure Come From?
Bitcoin to rise back to the parabola? Now it needs to find several trillion dollars first.
Navigating Web3 tides with focused insightsAuthor: CryptoSlate
Translation: TechFlow
TechFlow Editor's Note: ETF outflows, institutional hesitation, AI stealing investor attention... Bitcoin has become too large to be driven by retail investors alone. CryptoQuant founder Ki Young Ju did the math: In 2011, $2.7 million could drive BTC up 550 times; now it takes $101 billion to double it. Whether the next bull market arrives depends on whether wealth advisors, corporate treasurers, banks, and sovereign funds are willing to treat BTC as a long-term allocation rather than a short-term trade.
The next major surge in Bitcoin may no longer depend on whether investors believe in the asset, but on how much large capital is willing to participate with real money.
The latest analysis from CryptoQuant CEO Ki Young Ju shows that the world's largest cryptocurrency has grown into a market too large to be easily driven like in early cycles. According to him, each bull market requires more capital to generate smaller percentage gains, a shift that raises the threshold for another parabolic surge.
This point is now particularly important because BTC is in a prolonged bear market, with value falling to around $63,000, down 50% from the peak of over $126,000 recorded last October.
This retracement tests the institutional adoption that helped push the asset into mainstream portfolios; the core question now is whether Bitcoin can attract enough persistent capital to offset its declining price sensitivity.
Larger Market Changes Cycle Mathematics
Bitcoin's early gains were built on a much smaller base, allowing small amounts of new capital to produce huge price changes. As the asset matures, this relationship has weakened.
Ju's analysis compares the growth in Bitcoin's realized cap across several bull cycles with subsequent gains. Realized cap is calculated based on the price at which each coin last moved on-chain, making it a common proxy for the amount of capital absorbed by the network.
Ju said that in the 2011 cycle, net capital inflows of about $2.7 billion were associated with a price gain of about 55,000%.
The current cycle has absorbed about $697 billion, generating a gain of about 689%, highlighting that as the asset scale expands, much more capital is needed to generate smaller gains.
Chart: Bitcoin Price Returns and Realized Cap Gains
Source: CryptoQuant
The same pattern appears in smaller increments. Ju said that in 2011, about $5 million in new capital was enough to double the Bitcoin price. In the current cycle, this figure is about $101 billion.
While this does not end the bullish view surrounding BTC, it changes the type of demand required to sustain such a view.
Ju believes that if Bitcoin becomes a deeper macro allocation, another major surge is still possible. "Bitcoin needs to become a core macro asset," he wrote, adding that the market can no longer rely solely on retail-driven ETF trading.
This view turns Bitcoin's next cycle into a test of financial market integration. The supply shock from the halving continues to reduce new issuance, but the growth trajectory increasingly depends on whether capital allocators view Bitcoin as a recurring portfolio position rather than a tactical trade.
ETF Outflows Weaken Recent Setup
This test arrives at a time when the market's most prominent institutional tool is encountering difficulties.
U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs helped broaden access channels after launching in 2024, providing advisors, hedge funds, and traditional investors with a regulated path to access the asset. But recent fund flows have turned negative, weakening the argument that institutional demand is deep enough to support another major surge.
Data from Santiment shows that since early May, Bitcoin ETFs have seen nearly $10 billion in outflows, with these 12 products currently in a state of continuous outflows for 8 weeks.
Discussing these figures, BTC-focused analytics platform Ecoinometrics stated:
"The pattern since May has been very one-sided. Every attempt to rebuild buying momentum has stalled almost immediately.
Bitcoin ETFs have failed to achieve fund inflows for more than one consecutive day, while consecutive days of outflows have repeatedly lasted for several days, ultimately reaching the longest outflow period since the ETF launch."
Chart: Bitcoin ETF Outflows
Source: Ecoinometrics
These outflows complicate the situation of quickly returning to highs. Bitcoin's October record occurred during a period when investors were still rewarding ETF access and viewing the asset as a beneficiary of friendlier policies, institutional participation, and broader connections with global markets.
Now, the weakness in ETFs indicates that access channels alone are not enough. The next phase of adoption requires more stable allocation across wealth platforms, model portfolios, corporate balance sheets, and other capital pools; these pools move slower than retail traders but can be deployed at a larger scale.
For Bitcoin, this creates a demand landscape that is higher quality but harder to win. Institutions may bring larger checks, but before allocation becomes persistent, they also require liquidity, risk control, custody standards, portfolio mandates, and compliance approval.
Institutions Still Participating, But Standards Are Stricter
Despite these large outflows, survey data from Coinbase indicates that institutional interest has not disappeared.
A survey conducted by Coinbase and EY-Parthenon in January 2026 of 351 institutional decision-makers found that nearly three-quarters plan to increase crypto allocation, while 74% expect crypto prices to rise in the next 12 months.
The same survey found that 49% place greater emphasis on risk management, liquidity, and position sizing.
This combination is important for Bitcoin's capital question. Institutions are not approaching crypto with the same behavior that defined early retail-driven cycles.
They are more likely to require regulated products, clear governance, operational resilience, and clear exposure limits.
The survey found that 66% of respondents already have exposure through spot crypto ETFs or exchange-traded products, while 81% prefer to gain spot exposure through registered instruments.
These findings support the view that regulated wrapped instruments remain core to the next phase of adoption.
However, they also show why recent ETF outflows are a stress point. If ETFs are the primary institutional entry point, the continued weakness of these products could slow down the broader allocation process.
Therefore, Bitcoin's capital efficiency question is two-way. Its larger scale may make the asset more acceptable to traditional finance.
But this scale also means marginal buyers must be larger, more consistent, and less speculative than the buyers who drove early cycles.
Bitcoin's Next Buyers Must Compete with Other Wall Street Assets
This makes Bitcoin's next cycle dependent on a broader investor base than the retail traders and crypto-native funds that drove early gains.
MicroStrategy Executive Chairman Michael Saylor believes that Bitcoin's next decade will be less driven by miner issuance and more driven by capital flows across financial markets. MicroStrategy is the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, making Saylor one of the most prominent advocates for viewing the asset as a balance sheet tool rather than a speculative trade.
According to him:
"In the next decade, Bitcoin's trajectory will be less driven by miner issuance and more driven by capital flows.
ETF flows. Corporate treasury flows. Sovereign reserve flows. Bank credit flows. Derivative flows. Insurance flows. Collateral flows. Structured credit flows. Global savings flows.
Halving tightens supply. Capital flows set the growth trajectory.
This is the next phase of Bitcoin adoption: not just more buyers, but more balance sheets."
The point is that Bitcoin's supply story is no longer fresh. Its issuance schedule is known, the halving cycle is understandable, and the asset already trades at a scale that requires larger capital pools to meaningfully push it higher.
Therefore, any new repricing must come from demand channels capable of absorbing a market valued at over $1 trillion.
This means ETF demand is only part of this shift. A stronger cycle may require advisors to add Bitcoin to model portfolios, companies to use it more actively on balance sheets, banks to build credit products around it, insurers and asset managers to view it as a macro allocation, and sovereign entities to consider exposure over time.
This shift may be slower than retail momentum cycles. It will also expose Bitcoin more to interest rate expectations, regulatory delays, liquidity shocks, and competition from other markets chasing the same institutional capital.
Notably, artificial intelligence has become one of these competitors. AI-related assets and infrastructure have absorbed a large portion of investor attention this year, with spending and investment forecasts reaching trillions of dollars.
In early crypto cycles, looser speculative capital may have flowed into Bitcoin more easily. In the current market, Bitcoin must compete for the same pool of institutional capital with AI stocks, private infrastructure deals, credit products, commodities, and other macro trades.
This competition is now at the center of the Bitcoin cycle debate. The asset is now large enough to enter mainstream allocation discussions, but this also means it must be compared with all other major capital uses.
The views expressed by the author of this article represent their personal position only and do not represent the views of CryptoSlate.
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