Bitcoin's Turbulent Week: Price Plunge, JPMorgan's Bullish Call, and Industry Shakeup

This week, the cryptocurrency market experienced a significant downturn, with Bitcoin's price plunging toward new year-long lows. The decline had a ripple effect on the market, leading to a sharp decline in Strategy's shares and sparking concerns among investors. However, not everyone is bearish on Bitcoin's prospects. JPMorgan analysts argue that the cryptocurrency's long-term investment case versus gold has strengthened, despite its recent struggles. According to a recent note, JPMorgan analysts stated that Bitcoin's risk-adjusted profile versus gold has improved after gold's strong outperformance over the past year and a notable rise in volatility for the traditional safe-haven asset. The analysts believe that Bitcoin's long-term case versus gold is strengthening, even as the cryptocurrency suffers one of the sharpest market pullbacks in its history. The divergence between Bitcoin and gold has been stark, with gold climbing roughly a third since October 2025, while Bitcoin has fallen nearly 50% from its peak above $126,000. The downturn marks four consecutive months of declines — a stretch not seen since before the pandemic. Despite this, JPMorgan's analysts remain bullish on Bitcoin's long-term prospects. The decline in Bitcoin's price also had a significant impact on Strategy's shares, which dropped sharply on Thursday, tumbling more than 15% in heavy trading. The decline marked one of the largest single-day moves for Bitcoin-linked equity in recent months and reflected intensifying concerns among institutional and retail investors. The company's Q4 2025 earnings call is scheduled for later today, with analysts pricing in a sizable post-earnings move for Strategy. In other news, the cryptocurrency industry saw significant developments, including the shutdown of Merkle Trade, the largest decentralized perpetual futures exchange on Aptos by trading volume. The platform announced that it will begin winding down operations over the coming weeks, citing "careful consideration" as the reason for the decision. The shutdown will result in the closure of all remaining positions and the redemption of the platform's native MKL token. Aave, the largest decentralized lending platform, also made headlines this week with a proposal to pause three underused Layer 2 deployments of Aave V3. The proposal, put forward by the Aave Chan Initiative, aims to reduce operational overhead and governance burden by addressing instances that are clearly non-viable today. The proposed reduction in L2 deployments will affect zkSync Era, Metis, and Soneium, with the largest TVL currently held on zkSync. Finally, Polymarket, the largest on-chain prediction market by trading volume, announced a partnership with Circle to integrate native USDC as the primary collateral currency for trading on the platform. The partnership aims to make settlement on Polymarket more "institutionally aligned" as trading activity increases. With a supply of $70.77 billion, Circle's USDC is the second-largest stablecoin by market capitalization after Tether's USDT. Overall, this week's developments highlight the ongoing volatility and uncertainty in the cryptocurrency market. While some investors are bearish on Bitcoin's prospects, others, like JPMorgan's analysts, remain bullish on its long-term potential. As the industry continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how these developments play out and what the future holds for Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency market.