Bitcoin Could Keep Surging to New Highs Into 2026, Says Bernstein

As the White House pushes crypto on Capitol Hill, it’s becoming increasingly difficult to see the market peaking this year, analysts at investment firm Bernstein shared in Tuesday note.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s efforts to shape America into the “crypto capital of the world” appear “mission-ciritical,” they wrote, suggesting the bull market for Bitcoin and other digital assets will continue into 2026, with prices possibly peaking the following year.

Bitcoin’s price could reach anywhere between $150,000 and $200,000, with the market likely turning in six months to a year, the analysts wrote.

On Tuesday, the cryptocurrency changed hands around $113,000, a 5.5% drop over the past seven days, according to crypto data provider CoinGecko. Bitcoin set a new all-time high price above $124,000 last week before cooling off.

Bernstein analysts acknowledged that the performance would be a departure from the four-year cycles that Bitcoin’s price has historically followed, with its price topping out around $68,000 in 2021 and $20,000 in 2017.

Trump’s embrace of crypto could snap Bitcoin’s four-year cycles, but experts have made similar calls when pointing to structural changes in the Bitcoin market stemming from last year’s introduction of spot exchange-traded funds in the U.S.

Bernstein analysts also foresee a so-called altcoin season holding true this time around, mirroring market cycles past.

As the crypto market rallies into the tail end of this year, the analysts predicted Ethereum and Solana “could potentially lead the next leg of the digital assets cycle,” with interest rate cuts spurring risk-on sentiment and a renewed focus on decentralized finance and staking. They did not issue price targets for either cryptocurrency in Tuesday’s note.

DeFi took off in 2020, becoming a multibillion-dollar industry nearly overnight, as pandemic-era crypto users established concepts like yield farming, and projects took to governance tokens. Some DeFi protocols had users staking billions of dollars of food-themed meme coins, a precursor in some ways to the rampant speculation associated with meme coins today.

As on-chain yields return to focus, Bernstein analysts wrote that digital asset treasury firms established around Ethereum and Solana will continue to scale up. And unlike their Bitcoin-buying counterparts, those companies can engage in activities like staking to earn yield.

Bernstein analysts recognized Robinhood as one firm that’s been able to make its business model “more predictable” with crypto. The retail brokerage began letting U.S. customers stake digital assets in June, reducing the company’s reliance on volatile trading revenues, they said. As a result, Berinstein analysts lifted their price target for Robinhood shares to $160 from $105.

Robinhood shares are down nearly 6% on Tuesday to about $108 as of this writing, according to Yahoo Finance. As the company has leaned into crypto, shares have nearly tripled from $38.54 year-to-date.