2026년 2월 22일 · Unknown · financial · 출처 Yahoo Finance
(Bloomberg) — It wouldn’t have seemed possible a year ago. But Bitcoin has gotten caught in one of its deepest struggles yet, with no obvious way out.
The world’s largest cryptocurrency has plunged more than 40% from its peak, and the usual playbook isn’t working — dip buyers have vanished, and the forces that would normally fuel a rebound are now working against it. Gold is winning the macro-hedge argument. Stablecoins are winning payments. Prediction markets are winning speculation.
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The strange part: none of this is happening because the system failed Bitcoin. Washington has never been more accommodating. Institutional adoption has never been deeper. Wall Street has never been more bought in. Bitcoin got everything it wanted — and it wasn’t enough.
That means the defining struggle of this crypto era isn’t about price. It’s about purpose. And this selloff is forcing a question Bitcoin hasn’t needed to answer when prices were rising: if it isn’t the best hedge, the best payment rail or the best speculation — what, exactly, is it for?
“The central story of Bitcoin was ‘number go up’ and we don’t have that anymore,” said Owen Lamont, portfolio manager at Acadian Asset Management. “We have number go down. That is not a good story.”
The Narrative Problem
Unlike stocks or commodities, Bitcoin lacks fundamentals. Its value rests almost entirely on belief — on the strength of narratives that persuade new buyers to join.
Those stories are faltering. Retail traders who bought into the Trump-fueled rally are now deeply underwater.
“New speculative venues such as prediction markets — and commodities exchanges! — are siphoning away attention from crypto markets,” said Noelle Acheson, author ofnewsletter. “Now that BTC is a ‘macro asset,’ it has to compete with so many other alternatives, most of which are easier to understand and easier to explain to trustees, clients, your board, etc.”
The Defections
A clear signal came in November. Jack Dorsey — long one of Bitcoin’s most vocal corporate evangelists — announced his Cash App would begin supporting stablecoins. For years, Dorsey treated Bitcoin maximalism as doctrine. His pivot was a signal: the payments race had moved on.
In Washington, stablecoins have become the center of gravity. The bipartisan Genius Act passed easily. Regulators are openly encouraging dollar-backed token infrastructure. Even within crypto, Bitcoin is no longer the sole focus. Tokenization, blockchain-powered derivatives and cross-border stablecoin payments are emerging as credible use cases — none of which require Bitcoin to function.
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“If anything, stablecoin activity could be correlated with activity on Ethereum or on other chains. And stablecoins are for payments,” said Carlos Domingo, co-founder and CEO of Securitize, a tokenization platform. “I don’t think anybody today sees Bitcoin as a payment mechanism.”
The Financialization Trap
Ironically, Bitcoin’s unraveling began during its own rise. The 2025 bull run triggered a rush of institutional infrastructure that was meant to cement its legitimacy. Instead, it stripped the asset of its mystique.
Once a cipher for libertarian escape, Bitcoin now resembles every other Wall Street instrument: a ticker in a drop-down menu, bundled with zero-day options and volatility products. What once required a rabbit hole now takes a brokerage login.
Bitcoin’s defenders still point to its engineered scarcity — the 21 million cap, halving cycles, hard-coded deflation. But in markets, the scarcity that matters isn’t just of supply — it’s of attention. And the supply of things competing for that attention is now effectively infinite.
Altcoins. Altcoin derivatives. Tokenized stocks. Structured leveraged products. Scarcity may be coded, but abundance is manufactured. And even the code itself is facing scrutiny — the rise of quantum computing has begun to fuel fears that Bitcoin’s cryptographic foundations, long assumed to be unbreakable, may not be permanent. It’s a distant threat, but in a narrative-driven asset, the mere possibility is corrosive.
The Hedge That Wasn’t
Even after years of “digital gold” hype, Bitcoin has failed its most important macro test. Despite geopolitical jitters and enduring dollar weakness, gold and silver have staged volatile rallies this year, while crypto has only gone down. Flows confirm the divergence. US-listed gold and gold-themed ETFs pulled in more than $16 billion in the past three months, while spot Bitcoin ETFs saw roughly $3.3 billion in outflows, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Bitcoin’s market cap has shrunk by over $1 trillion.
“People are realizing that Bitcoin is what it’s always been — which is simply a speculative asset,” said Tom Essaye, president and founder of Sevens Report and a former Merrill Lynch trader. “Bitcoin is not replacing gold, it’s not digital gold, it doesn’t do the same thing, it doesn’t give people the same utility that gold does. It’s not an inflation hedge — there are other better hedges, frankly, where you don’t have to worry about the volatility. And it’s not a chaos hedge either.”
The Treasury Unwind
The digital-asset treasury model was supposed to be Bitcoin’s corporate identity. Companies like Strategy Inc. amassed Bitcoin during the bull run and issued shares against it, creating a self-reinforcing loop that conjured billions in market cap and gave institutional investors a way to express conviction without touching the asset directly. For a time, it worked.
Now the loop has reversed — and with it, the credibility of the model. The largest DATs have plunged over the past year — some far more than Bitcoin itself. Many now trade below the value of their holdings.
The Spec…