“Last Time Under $90K”? What Cameron Winklevoss and Arthur Hayes Really Tell Us About Bitcoin’s Next Move

Bitcoin is back in its favourite position: at the centre of a tug-of-war between euphoria and dread.

After touching record highs above $125,000 in October, BTC has slid almost 30%, briefly breaking below the psychologically critical $90,000 mark for the first time in roughly seven months. Spot ETFs have flipped from steady inflows to persistent outflows, macro data is undermining hopes for rapid US rate cuts, and crypto-wide market cap has shed more than a trillion dollars in just over a month.

Into that chaos, two familiar voices have offered starkly different ways to frame the same price zone. On one side, Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder of Gemini and long-time Bitcoin bull, took to X with a blunt message:

“This is the last time you'll ever be able to buy bitcoin below $90k!”

On the other, Arthur Hayes – co-founder of BitMEX and arguably one of crypto’s most closely watched macro commentators – has been telling his audience to brace for more pain before the next melt-up. In his latest outlook, he says Bitcoin can “absolutely” trade down into the $80,000–$85,000 region in the near term, even as he reiterates a long-run target in the $200,000–$250,000 range if liquidity tides turn.

Same chart, two narratives: “last chance” versus “not done dumping.” For a professional investor, the right response is not to pick a hero and go all-in, but to understand what each view is really saying about market structure and risk.

1. The setup: a brutal give-back after a euphoric breakout

First, the context. Bitcoin’s drop below $90,000 hasn’t come out of nowhere. It’s the tail end of a classic post-breakout shakeout:

• In early October, BTC ripped to all-time highs north of $126,000, fuelled by optimism about a crypto-friendly White House, strong ETF inflows and a broad risk-asset rally.
• Since then, the market has flipped hard. Concerns about the Federal Reserve’s rate-cut path, patchy economic data due to the US government shutdown and wobbling global equities have all fed a risk-off move.
• Spot Bitcoin ETFs, which once front-ran every upside move, are now seeing billions in net redemptions as investors de-risk and rebalance. At the same time, technical levels that bulls treated as unbreakable – including key weekly moving averages and the $93,000–$95,000 zone – have given way.

The result: Bitcoin has not only surrendered its year-to-date gains, it has also punched through a level that many retail traders had mentally upgraded from “resistance” to “permanent floor.” The $90K handle has quickly gone from a victory trophy to a referendum on whether this cycle is still intact.

This is exactly the environment in which punchy one-liners from high-profile figures can shape sentiment far more than their tweet length would suggest.

2. What Winklevoss is really saying with “last time under $90K”

Cameron Winklevoss is not a day-trader dropping a meme. He’s a billionaire early adopter who has lived through multiple 70–80% Bitcoin drawdowns and built an exchange business around the asset. When he posts that this is the “last time” BTC trades below $90,000, he’s compressing a whole thesis into one sentence:

• Structural demand is here to stay. The rise of spot ETFs, growing institutional mandates and even early moves by retirement products all point, in his view, to a world where marginal buyers are increasingly large, regulated pools of capital rather than only retail punters.
• Bitcoin’s role in portfolios is maturing. To the Winklevoss camp, BTC is steadily graduating from pure speculative trade to strategic macro exposure – a “digital gold” allocation that more CIOs feel compelled to at least consider.
• Current price action is a shakeout, not a regime change. A 30% drawdown after a vertical run is painful, but hardly unprecedented in Bitcoin’s history. Framed through that lens, the sub-$90K zone is a discount inside an ongoing secular uptrend, not the start of a new multi-year bear market.

In other words, Winklevoss isn’t claiming that no wick will ever again print 8-something on the left. He’s making a cycle-level statement: if his structural adoption thesis is right, the region we’re in today will look cheap in hindsight when you zoom out five or ten years.

There’s also a psychological component. In times of extreme fear, strong statements from veteran participants can act as a counter-weight to doom-scrolling. “Last time under $90K” is meant to jolt investors out of a purely short-term, candle-to-candle mindset and force them to ask: what am I actually betting on here – weekly noise, or multi-year monetisation of a scarce asset?

3. The Hayes counterpoint: liquidity still rules everything

Arthur Hayes comes at the same chart from almost the opposite direction. Where Winklevoss is focusing on ultimate destination, Hayes is focused on the road – and specifically, on the liquidity potholes along it.

In his latest notes, Hayes argues that Bitcoin’s sell-off is primarily a liquidity story, not a sign that the long-term thesis is broken. In his framing:

• Rising US yields and tighter dollar liquidity are forcing funds to rotate out of risk assets, including Bitcoin.
• ETF flows have flipped because the marginal buyer – often a macro fund – is now more interested in T-bills and cash than in adding to volatile crypto exposure.
• Leverage that piled up during the run to $125K has to be flushed out properly before a sustainable advance resumes.

That’s why Hayes is comfortable writing that Bitcoin could “absolutely drop” into the $80,000–$85,000 pocket in the coming weeks. In his view, the market has not yet completed the full cycle of forced deleveraging, ETF de-risking and “tourist exit” that typically marks a durable low. Only once that’s done – and once policymakers are forced by credit stress or market wobble to loosen liquidity again – does his ultra-bullish target of $200K+ come into play.

It’s important to see that Winklevoss and Hayes are not as far apart as their headlines suggest. Both are long-term bullish. Both believe this cycle is not over. The disagreement is about path dependence: does the market have to scare out a few more “weak hands” in the $80Ks before marching higher, or has that process largely happened already around $90K?

4. The $90K zone as a psychological fault line

Why does the $90,000 level matter so much that a single tweet about it makes mainstream news?

Part of the answer is simple human psychology. Round numbers act as anchors. They are where retail investors place stop-losses and limit orders, where trendline drawings converge, and where narratives crystallise. “Six-figure Bitcoin” has been a meme for years; $90K now sits close enough to that threshold to feel like the difference between “we’re still going to the moon” and “the dream is over.”

Under the surface, several technical and structural features cluster in this area:

• Prior breakout zone. The band just under $90K is not far above the range that capped Bitcoin earlier in the year. When markets retest such areas from above, they often become battlegrounds between late longs and early dip-buyers.
• Leverage overhang. Many leveraged traders built positions assuming that the first break into six figures would be sustained. As price drifts lower, margin calls and liquidations tend to accelerate around obvious levels.
• ETF investor psychology. A surprising number of ETF buyers mentally key off round prices, even if their prospectuses don’t. For an investor who bought a $110K breakout via an ETF, seeing spot trade at $89K feels like not just a correction, but a regime change.

All of this makes the $90K region a sentiment amplifier. When bulls control it, declarations like Winklevoss’s feel prescient. When it cracks, forecasts like Hayes’s start to sound more realistic.

5. Three scenarios from here: not predictions, but frameworks

Rather than fixating on one personality, it’s more useful to translate their views into concrete scenarios that can be monitored and traded around. Here is one way to break it down.

5.1. Scenario A – Winklevoss is (roughly) right: the low is in or very close

In this path, Bitcoin’s flush below $90K is the tail end of a sharp but typical bull-market correction. ETF outflows stabilise, macro data softens enough to revive rate-cut hopes, and risk assets across the board find a footing. On-chain, we would expect to see:

• Short-term holders capitulating into the $85K–$90K band, locking in losses.
• Long-term holders (LTHs) slowing their distribution after a period of profit-taking at six-figure prices.
• Derivatives funding rates normalising, indicating that excessive long leverage has been washed out.

Price action in this scenario might look like a sharp rebound from sub-$90K into the mid-$90Ks, followed by a period of choppy consolidation before a new attempt at six figures. In hindsight, charts would show the November dip as the final “buyable panic” of the cycle – the kind of move that future bulls love to circle on log charts and say, “see, that was obvious.”

5.2. Scenario B – Hayes is right on the path: we test the low $80Ks first

Here, the market has more work to do. ETF redemptions continue for several more weeks, perhaps catalysed by another macro shock: a hotter-than-expected inflation print, hawkish Fed rhetoric, or stress in credit markets. Risk assets reprice broadly, not just in crypto.

Bitcoin, in that environment, grinds lower rather than collapsing – but the grind is relentless enough to push spot into the $80,000–$85,000 pocket. Social feeds fill with failed “buy the dip” screenshots. Pessimism turns into apathy.

The medium-term impact of this scenario is paradoxically healthy. By the time BTC revisits the $90Ks from below, the holder base has rotated: late-cycle leveraged longs are gone, replaced by better-capitalised buyers with a multi-year horizon. If, as Hayes argues, this process coincides with or slightly precedes a new wave of liquidity injections from central banks, the stage is set for a powerful second leg higher.

5.3. Scenario C – both are early: a longer, messier consolidation

There is also a less glamorous possibility: that Bitcoin simply chops in a wide band between, say, $80K and $105K for many months, frustrating both perma-bulls and perma-bears. In this case, neither “last time under $90K” nor “imminent $80K flush” captures the grind.

Historically, such mid-cycle ranges have been where the real structural accumulation happens – not in the headline blow-offs or the panic wicks, but in the boring middle where narratives are confusing and funding is scarce. For long-term allocators, this is where dollar-cost averaging and disciplined rebalancing matter more than hero calls.

6. How a professional should use these narratives (instead of being used by them)

Cameron Winklevoss and Arthur Hayes are not just tweeting for fun. Their words move retail behaviour and, at the margin, shape expectations for institutional desks too. The key for a professional outlet – and for its readers – is to turn those narratives into inputs, not marching orders.

Practically, that means:

• Translating slogans into risk parameters. “Last time under $90K” can be read as: this region is attractive for adding long-term exposure, but size entries assuming you may still be early by 10–15%.
• Mapping Hayes’s downside band into concrete levels. If $80K–$85K is a plausible liquidity low, you can structure option spreads, staggered bids or stop-losses around that region instead of reacting in real time if it prints.
• Separating timeframe from conviction. Both men are clear that they are bullish on a one- to two-year view. The disagreement is about weeks and months. Traders who confuse those horizons are the ones most likely to panic-sell at the bottom and FOMO at the top.

Most importantly, neither quote should be treated as a guarantee. Market history is full of “last chance” calls that aged badly and doom scenarios that never materialised. The value in tracking them is not to outsource your thinking, but to understand how the collective story about Bitcoin is being written in real time.

7. What this moment says about Bitcoin’s maturation

Stepping back, the Winklevoss–Hayes contrast is a microcosm of where Bitcoin finds itself in late 2025.

On one hand, the asset has never been more integrated into mainstream finance. Spot ETFs, corporate treasuries and even early retirement-account experiments mean that dips below $90K now trigger memos in investment committees, not just Telegram channels. When a billionaire exchange founder tweets about “last chance” levels, financial media outlets treat it as macro-relevant commentary, not fringe hype.

On the other hand, Bitcoin still behaves like the high-beta, liquidity-sensitive asset it has always been. A few weeks of ETF outflows, some rate-cut repricing and a wave of forced liquidations are enough to erase an entire year’s gains. Analysts debate $80K versus $90K in the same breath as they talk about $200K and beyond.

This tension – between structural adoption and cyclical fragility – is not a bug. It is what late-stage monetisation looks like. Gold went through similar phases as it moved from a niche hedge to a core macro allocation: multiple 30–50% drawdowns on the way to new plateaus, often triggered by liquidity shocks rather than changes in the underlying thesis.

Bitcoin, with a harder supply cap and a more reflexive investor base, amplifies those dynamics. Tweets from people like Winklevoss and essays from people like Hayes simply give that process a human voice.

Conclusion: opportunity, risk, and the stories we tell around a number

“I hope this is the last time you can buy Bitcoin under $90,000” is a catchy line. So is “Bitcoin could absolutely drop to $80K.” Both are trying to anchor your expectations around a number on a screen. But ultimately, neither Cameron Winklevoss nor Arthur Hayes will live with the consequences of how you trade those numbers. You will.

A truly professional approach to this moment accepts three things at once:

1. Sub-$90K Bitcoin is, on any multi-cycle view, not obviously expensive – especially if you believe in continued institutionalisation and eventual six-figure equilibrium prices.
2. The path from here to that equilibrium is unlikely to be smooth. Liquidity, leverage and macro conditions can easily drag BTC another 10–20% lower before the next leg higher, even within a healthy bull market.
3. Risk management matters more than being able to say “I bought the exact bottom.” Position sizing, time horizon and diversification will do more for long-term outcomes than correctly choosing between a bullish tweet and a cautious blog post.

At $89K, $90K or $95K, Bitcoin is not a story about one billionaire’s conviction or another’s warning. It is a story about how a still-young monetary network absorbs shocks, redistributes coins from weak hands to strong ones, and slowly finds out what the world is willing to pay for 21 million units of digitally enforced scarcity.

That process will outlast this week’s volatility – and this week’s quotes.

This article is for informational and educational purposes only and does not constitute investment, trading, legal or tax advice. Digital assets are highly volatile and may be unsuitable for many investors. Always conduct your own research and consider consulting a qualified professional before making financial decisions.