Bitcoin is no longer the market’s clock, and every asset bottoms when it feels like it
The peaks are no longer on the same day
In 2025 Ethereum’s highest close is 22 August 2025 and Bitcoin’s is 6 October 2025: 45 days apart. In 2022 Ethereum’s bottom was 18 June 2022 and Bitcoin’s 21 November 2022: 156 days.
A gap of this size has no precedent. In the 2021 cycle the distance between bitcoin’s peak and the altcoins’ was a few weeks; here we are talking about months, and in some cases a whole year.
The most convincing reason sits in who is buying. The bitcoin ETFs have created an institutional flow that concerns bitcoin alone, and that flow has partly detached its price from the rest of the ecosystem. The altcoins, which have no such vehicle, have been left moving on the demand they always had — the demand of people.
The 2022 precedent, which nobody tells this way
Whoever bought ethereum in June, without waiting for bitcoin to finish falling, took home five months of head start. And it wasn’t luck: ethereum never went back to that low, even though bitcoin lost another forty percent in the months that followed.
Today the structure looks like that one: ethereum has already lost 37.6 percent from its peak, bitcoin 26.7. The first is further along its path, the second still has road ahead — and whoever treats them as one thing is looking at two different clocks as though they were the same.
As of 27 November 2025 Ethereum is down 37.6 percent from its own peak of 22 August 2025, Bitcoin down 26.7 percent from its own of 6 October 2025.
What the speed of the fall says
On the weekly step the picture is sharper still: ethereum is in territory comparable to the 2022 floor. Historically these levels of excess have preceded phases of accumulation and then recovery, and that is why I am not selling here.
Bitcoin shows a different structure: the same measure hasn’t yet touched ethereum’s extreme values. Translated: it may still have room to correct while ethereum is already in an advanced phase of its own. They are two different phases of the same market, and they have to be treated differently.
Is the December upgrade a trigger or not?
History, though, teaches caution: Ethereum’s upgrades have had mixed effects in the short term. The move to validation by security, in 2022, was followed by a sell-the-news. Over the medium term, upgrades that improve the network’s economics do tend to show up in the valuation.
Whoever calls it an underpriced trigger is pointing exactly there: if the fee reforms for the upper layers work, the network’s revenue widens. The market isn’t pricing it at all for now — ethereum trades near the year’s lows a few days from activation. Whether that is an opportunity or a verdict, the quarter after will say, not the week.
What changes in the way you buy
Every asset has to be watched on its own, with its own moment of entry. It is more work and it produces uncomfortable decisions: buying something while bitcoin is still falling feels wrong, and in 2022 it was the right move.
One risk stays in front of everything: the correlation with American equities. The main index still hasn’t had a real correction after months of rising, and the ratio between ethereum and that index has been weak since October. If equities corrected even five percent, it would arrive amplified on crypto — and the altcoins, still the asset perceived as riskiest, would do worst of all.
Ethereum’s peak: 22 August 2025, $4,832. Bitcoin’s peak: 6 October 2025, $124,659. The largest altcoins marked their own peaks between November and December 2024.
and bitcoin’s