Bitcoin’s price history may be tightly linked to the US political calendar, according to a new analysis by Alphractal founder Joao Wedson. His research suggests that the flagship cryptocurrency consistently enters a bear market about one year before US midterm elections and then launches a prolonged bull run shortly after voters cast their ballots. The pattern, outlined in a July 30 post on X, shows cycle bottoms forming just days or weeks around the midterms, followed by a recovery that extends into the next year.
Wedson also noted a distinct behavior during presidential cycles: Bitcoin rallies strongly when a candidate wins and often reaches a major cycle top soon after inauguration day. He pointed to XRP as an even starker example, where the token began a steep rally on the day Donald Trump won the 2024 election and hit a local peak exactly on January 20, 2025 – the inauguration date.
These observations mirror earlier findings from Binance Research, which calculated that Bitcoin dropped by an average of 56% during completed midterm cycles since 2014, then returned an average gain of 54% in the following year. The current environment adds weight to the analysis: with roughly three months until the next midterms, BTC is trading near $64,000, down nearly 50% from its October 2025 all-time high of over $126,000. It slipped about 2.5% over the past week but is still up nearly 8% for the month, partly reacting to the Federal Reserve’s decision to hold interest rates steady at 3.50%–3.75%.
Despite the promising historical template, Wedson cautioned that a price bounce alone is not enough to call a structural bottom. He insists that clear signs of market capitulation, a significant deleveraging across the ecosystem, and fresh inflows of capital from new investors must materialize before a sustainable bull market can be confirmed. Until those signals align, he says, the market remains in a fragile state and the historical pattern could be disrupted by shifting macro conditions.
