Researchers at Schwab and Hashdex said AI has diverted capital from digital assets while bitcoin continues to follow a familiar post-halving recovery pattern.
By Helene Braun|Edited by Oliver Knight Jul 4, 2026, 4:00 p.m. 2 min readMake preferred on Share this articleMake preferred on
Bitcoin's BTC$64,617.13 lackluster performance this year has puzzled investors.
Despite record highs in equities, the world's largest cryptocurrency has struggled to regain momentum while U.S. technology stocks have surged on enthusiasm surrounding AI as it currently trades just below the $62,000 mark, down over 50% from its peak price in October.
Two new outlooks from asset managers Hashdex and Charles Schwab argue the disconnect is temporary, albeit for different reasons.
Samir Kerbage, chief investment officer at Hashdex, said crypto's recent weakness says more about where investors are allocating capital than about the health of the digital asset ecosystem.
"Capital follows attention and narratives," Kerbage wrote in a midyear market outlook. "Crypto has benefited from this in the past but right now, attention is elsewhere. AI infrastructure plays, IPO pipelines, macro positioning around rate expectations, are absorbing the flows."
That rotation, he argued, has overshadowed several structural developments that continue to strengthen crypto's long-term investment case. Institutional infrastructure is expanding across banks, brokers and payment providers, while regulatory clarity in the U.S. has improved and could strengthen further if Congress passes the CLARITY Act this summer.
Meanwhile, crypto's underlying usage continues to grow even as prices remain subdued.
Stablecoin transaction volume in the first half of the year has already exceeded all of 2025, while tokenized real-world assets have grown more than 60% year to date. The firm also said crypto ecosystem transactions reached record highs during the second quarter.
"The gap between market capitalization and on-chain activity has never been wider," Kerbage wrote, arguing that disconnect between prices and network fundamentals is unlikely to persist indefinitely.
Charles Schwab reached a similar conclusion from a different starting point.
Rather than focusing on capital flows, Schwab’s director of digital currencies research and strategy, Jim Ferraioli, examined bitcoin's historical market cycles. He argued that the cryptocurrency's prolonged recovery is broadly consistent with previous post-halving periods, even if many investors expected institutional adoption and spot exchange-traded funds to permanently alter bitcoin's traditional four-year cycle.
According to Ferraioli, bitcoin has historically taken more than a year after bear market bottoms to reclaim levels above the production costs of less efficient miners, which he currently estimates at roughly $95,000. The average investor's cost basis also sits near $80,000, creating potential selling pressure as holders look to exit positions after recovering losses.
While Ferraioli stopped short of declaring that bitcoin's four-year cycle is a law of markets, he argued the pattern has become ingrained in investor psychology.
"Through enough market lore, the so-called 'bitcoin halving cycle' has become a feature of bitcoin," he said, adding that the impact of each cycle may diminish over time as the asset matures and volatility declines.
Bitcoin NewsRelated AssetsBitcoin$64,617.131.02%
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