A bull market is a sustained period of rising prices. The word comes from traditional finance and was imported into crypto without modification, though the thing it describes in crypto is more extreme. A typical equity bull market sees the index double over five or six years. A typical crypto bull market sees Bitcoin rise ten to twenty times in eighteen months and then give most of it back in the next twelve.
Crypto’s historical bull markets are easy to point at because they have been so spectacular. 2013 (Bitcoin from about $13 to $1,200). 2017 (Bitcoin from $1,000 to $19,700, altcoins from tiny to ICO-mania). 2020-2021 (Bitcoin from $10,000 to $69,000, NFTs, DeFi summer, Solana). 2023-2024 (Bitcoin from $16,000 to $108,000, spot ETFs, MicroStrategy, the fourth halving). Each cycle has looked different in its details and been driven by different narratives, but the pattern rhymes.
What Actually Happens in One
The rough shape of a crypto bull market goes like this. Bitcoin leads. The price rallies past its previous all-time high on some macro or regulatory catalyst. The first wave of new money comes in through the easiest channel (ETFs in 2024, retail exchanges in 2017, OTC in 2013). Dominance — Bitcoin’s share of the total crypto market cap — rises in the early phase because BTC is absorbing most of the inflow.
Then the rotation starts. Ethereum outperforms. DeFi tokens start making new highs. The ETH/BTC ratio climbs and the BTC dominance chart turns over. Mid-cap altcoins have their moment. Narratives emerge and get traded — in 2021 it was layer ones, memecoins, and NFTs; in 2024 it has been AI tokens, real-world assets, and meme-driven Solana trades.
Somewhere near the peak, retail floods in, terminology gets sloppier, and the lowest-quality projects see the biggest gains. This is always the warning sign but it is also when most of the money is being made, so the warning is largely ignored. Eventually something breaks — a leveraged blowup, a regulatory crackdown, a macro tightening — and the price turns. The decline is faster than the advance. Twelve months later nobody wants to talk about crypto any more, the infrastructure builds in the background, and the clock starts ticking toward the next one.
Whether This Cycle Still Applies
The four-year cycle centred on Bitcoin halvings has been remarkably consistent for over a decade. But each cycle is less pronounced than the last as the asset gets larger and more institutionalised. The 2024-2025 cycle has been driven by ETF flows, not retail mania, which changes the behaviour of the market in ways the old playbook does not quite account for. It is still a bull market; it just does not look exactly like the previous ones. Whether that means the cycle is dead or just evolving is a question you will be reading articles about for the next two years.