There’ll be no short-term Bitcoin recovery ahead unless US President Donald Trump decides to diffuse global tensions, a market analyst has warned.
Investors’ appetite for risky investments plummeted at the start of 2026, Vladislav Antonov, a financial analyst at the Bitcoin mining firm BitRiver, told the Russian publication RBC.
“For Bitcoin to make a comprehensive return to positive price growth, one of two things needs to happen,” Antonov said. “We need to either see a return to institutions buying [crypto] exchange-traded funds, or the global macroeconomic backdrop needs to improve significantly. Neither of those things is currently on the horizon.”
The forecast comes as Bitcoin prices have hovered roughly 30% below the October record high of $126,000 for the past three months. While several analysts have predicted that the top crypto’s price will skyrocket in 2026, so far the digital asset has spent the first weeks of January trembling around the $90,000 mark.
Gold rush
Bitcoin price has hinged on whether the interest rates are high or low, with lower interest rates incentivising investors to tap into riskier assets like cryptocurrencies.
However, Antonov said the chances of the Federal Reserve cutting rates in the first quarter of the year were now vanishingly small.
Investors give it a 95% chance that the US central bank will keep interest rates unchanged at its January meeting, according to the CME’s FedWatch Tool.
And he added geopolitical instability is forcing investors to retreat to “safer financial havens” like gold.
“Gold has made a powerful surge above $4,500 this month,” Antonov said. “It is being supported by geopolitical tensions and demand from central banks.”
Trump’s “escalatory rhetoric” on the matter of Greenland’s sovereignty and social unrest in Iran has “played a particularly important role, fuelling capital inflows” into assets that investors consider safer than Bitcoin, Antonov said.
Bitcoin market players are now waiting to see how stock market traders behave before buying or selling coins, Antonov added.
“The reason for this is simple,” he said. “The world is on the brink of a new geopolitical crisis.”
Fears of coming conflicts are forcing many institutional investors out of the market, Antonov added.
“Investors are withdrawing their funds en masse from spot Bitcoin ETFs. From January 6 to 9, outflows totalled $1.378 billion.”
Eyes on Trump
BitRiver calculations give Bitcoin a 55% chance of making a short-term recovery to $95,000, the analyst said. But Antonov said the crypto market “is dependent on external factors, and there are currently so many of them around.”
The analyst added that the firm’s calculations show that if Bitcoin prices do break through the $95,000 mark, “growth will quickly accelerate to $103,500.”
But he predicted that any such “success” would depend entirely “on winds created by Trump and the stock market.”
“Bitcoin is currently frozen between fear and hope; between war and rhetoric,” Antonov concluded.
Not everyone shares BitRiver’s gloomy outlook, however. David Brickell and Chris Mills of the London Crypto Club recently forecasted a Bitcoin price surge sparked by US dollar devaluation.
And Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of the BitMEX exchange, said US intervention in Venezuela could see Bitcoin prices rise to $200,000 in the first quarter of 2026.
