Data scientist and Bitcoin Daily founder Josh Molnar’s new SSRN study shows why the famous top indicators went quiet, and puts a dated bottom call on the record for this fall.

MIAMI, July 22, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — For a decade, indicators like Pi Cycle, MVRV and the Mayer Multiple reliably flagged Bitcoin‘s cycle tops. At Bitcoin‘s largest top ever, near $126,000 on October 6, 2025, not one of them fired. A new study, “Bitcoin Runs on a Clock” by Josh Molnar, data scientist and founder of Bitcoin Daily, shows the silence was structural, and the same halving clock that called the 2025 top now puts a cycle bottom window between October 5 and November 16, 2026 on the record. The paper and code are at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=6977940.

Bitcoin's MVRV top alarm peaked lower every cycle, 5.88 to 4.72 to 3.96 to 2.74, and never reached its trigger line at the October 2025 all-time high. Source, the SSRN study "Bitcoin Runs on a Clock."

Bitcoin‘s price swings shrink every cycle, and the popular top indicators are lines drawn at a fixed height. As the waves get smaller, they stop reaching the trigger line. MVRV’s peak fell from 5.88 to 4.72 to 3.96 to 2.74 across four cycles; the Mayer Multiple went from 8.26 to 1.52. The decay began three cycles before a Bitcoin ETF existed. “The signals never missed before because the wave was always big enough to touch the line,” said Molnar. “That was never skill.”

The timing did not decay. Cycle tops keep landing 525 to 546 days after each halving. In 10,000 simulated random markets, none clustered that tightly under the study’s primary test; the most conservative variant put the odds near one in a thousand. “The amplitude is dying, but the clock is not,” Molnar said.

The trend fit is causal, seeing only past data, and statistics that failed a shuffle test were thrown out. The pattern repeats on a second data source and on Ethereum, and public code reproduces every number.

The paper makes two dated calls. A cycle bottom between October 5 and November 16, 2026, and the next cycle top 525 to 546 days after the following halving, currently pointing to late 2029. Unlike other October bottom calls, this one comes from the arithmetic that called the 2025 top in advance, with a hard falsification date.

In a YouTube video from January 11, 2025 (https://youtu.be/m8wvCwnI_Qk), nearly nine months ahead, Molnar told his audience Bitcoin would top in October 2025. It topped on October 6. His price call that cycle, $150,000 to $200,000, missed against a high near $126,000. Right on when, wrong on how much, is the paper’s whole thesis playing out in public.

A plain-English explanation is at https://bitcoin-daily.com/research.

About Josh Molnar

Josh Molnar (Bitcoin Jae) is a data scientist, the founder of Bitcoin Daily, and the author of “Bitcoin Runs on a Clock.” He taught himself to trade years before founding Bitcoin Daily in 2017 and grew it past 500,000 followers. Nothing Bitcoin Daily publishes is financial advice.

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Two independent measurements, one from the October 2025 top and one from the April 2024 halving, point to the same Bitcoin cycle bottom window this fall, overlapping in mid-October 2026. Source, the SSRN study "Bitcoin Runs on a Clock"