Updated: Even a new rate cut in December 2025, so what? No 100k corssing yet for BTC. It would it would but when liquidity flows.
I was having a conversation with a friend last week about the Changpeng Zhao pardon and whether this would trigger some kind of mini bull run for crypto. His argument was that Trump pardoning the Binance founder in late October 2025 signals massive institutional acceptance, regulatory clarity, all the usual talking points people bring up when they want to feel bullish about their bags.
My response was simpler: this is not the catalyst you think it is. If anything, these headline events are a gift to market makers and exchanges who get to feast on the stop losses and liquidations of retail traders who buy the news expecting continuation.
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What Actually Happened After the Pardon
Deeply grateful for today’s pardon and to President Trump for upholding America’s commitment to fairness, innovation, and justice.
— CZ 🔶 BNB (@cz_binance) October 23, 2025
🙏🙏🙏🙏
Will do everything we can to help make America the Capital of Crypto and advance web3 worldwide.
(Still in flight, more posts to come.)…
When the pardon announcement dropped, Bitcoin had just touched a record high above $125,000 on strong investor demand. The narrative was everywhere—crypto is legitimized, Trump is the crypto president, this changes everything.
Then the price pulled back. By the end of October, Bitcoin was looking at nearly a 5% monthly loss. Reuters described it as “broader market jitters and muted investor risk appetite” which is financial journalist speak for “the pump did not hold.”
- Bitcoin hit $125,000+ on pardon news
- Pulled back within days
- October closed down almost 5%
- The “bullish catalyst” turned into a local top
This pattern should look familiar to anyone who has been in crypto longer than one cycle.
We Have Seen This Exact Movie Before
Remember March 2, 2025? Trump posted about the Crypto Strategic Reserve including XRP, SOL, ADA, with a follow-up about BTC and ETH being at the heart of it. The “I also love Bitcoin and Ethereum” tweet. Social media lost its mind.
What happened next? Temporary spike. Then if you look at the charts from the following days and weeks, the price did what it always does after these announcement pumps—it retraced and left behind a trail of liquidated longs from people who thought the tweet meant up only forever. And we saw a bear market feel in aprl 2025 after this.
And if you really want to go back, look at Trump’s actual history with crypto. July 11, 2019:
“I am not a fan of Bitcoin and other Cryptocurrencies, which are not money, and whose value is highly volatile and based on thin air. Unregulated Crypto Assets can facilitate unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity.”
This is the same person. Six years later he is pardoning CZ and declaring America the crypto capital of the world. By October 2024 he was tweeting “Happy 16th Anniversary of Satoshi’s White Paper” and promising to end “Kamala’s war on crypto.”
The point is not that Trump is inconsistent, because politicians shift positions all the time and that is just how the game works. The point is that his tweets and announcements are not the fundamental driver of where Bitcoin goes. They create temporary volatility that mostly benefits people positioned to trade around it, not people who buy after the headline hoping for continuation.
The Real Bull Run Is Already Happening (You Might Have Missed It)
Here is what I actually think when I look at the bigger picture. If you compare Bitcoin’s price from its cycle low to the $125,000+ all-time high, that move is massive. The bull run is not something we are waiting for—it already happened and is arguably still happening depending on your timeframe.
What people actually mean when they say they are waiting for a bull run is usually one of two things:
- They want altcoin season where their smaller bags pump 10-20x
- They bought near recent highs and need price to go higher to feel good about their position
Neither of these has anything to do with Trump tweets or CZ pardons. Altcoin season historically requires excessive liquidity flowing into the system, which means either:
- Quantitative easing and money printing returning in a meaningful way
- Some other macro shift that pushes capital into risk assets broadly
- Bitcoin dominance peaking and rotating into alts, now I would also look for USDT/USD* dominance
No pardon creates this. No tweet creates this. These are monetary policy and liquidity cycle phenomena that happen on their own timeline regardless of what any politician posts on social media.
Why These Events Are “Modest and Short-Lived”
The market has seen enough of these cycles now that the playbook is fairly transparent. Headline drops, price spikes on retail excitement, smart money sells into that demand, price retraces, retail holds bags or gets liquidated depending on how leveraged they were.
BTC dropped to the $80,000 level just last week if you look at the charts. This is after:
- The CZ pardon “bullish” news
- The strategic reserve announcements
- Trump’s continued pro-crypto positioning
- All the institutional adoption narratives
The price went down anyway because Bitcoin does what Bitcoin does based on liquidity cycles, leverage in the system, and broader macro conditions. The fundamentals of BTC as an asset are strong and have been strong, which is why it recovers from these drawdowns over time. But the short-term price action does not care about pardons.
What This Actually Means If You Hold Crypto
I am not saying any of this to be bearish or to tell people to sell. My view is that BTC fundamentally remains what it has always been—a scarce digital asset that tends to appreciate over long time horizons through volatile cycles that shake out impatient holders.
The current downtrend from all-time highs is something that happens to Bitcoin after every major run. It happened after 2017, after 2021, and it is happening now. This is not BTC going to zero. This is not the end of crypto. This is just what the asset does between cycle peaks.
If you bought during peak FOMO candles and you are underwater right now, the issue is not that Trump’s pardon failed to pump your bags. The issue is timing and expectations. Either you have the patience to hold through a cycle correction or you bought more than you could afford to lose emotionally.
What I have learned to ignore:
- Presidential tweets about crypto (bullish or bearish)
- Pardon announcements and regulatory “clarity” narratives
- “This changes everything” headlines from crypto media
- Short-term price reactions to any political news
What I actually watch:
- Liquidity conditions and central bank policy
- Bitcoin dominance for alt rotation signals
- Leverage and funding rates in the system
- Longer timeframe chart structure
The first list creates trading opportunities for people who know how to fade retail excitement. The second list tells you something about where we actually are in a cycle.
My Honest Take
I waited weeks after the CZ pardon news specifically to see how it would play out before writing anything about it. What I saw confirmed what I expected—temporary excitement followed by price doing whatever it was going to do anyway based on factors that have nothing to do with who Trump pardoned.
If you are waiting for some announcement or tweet to kick off the bull run that makes your portfolio hit your target numbers, you might be waiting for something that is not coming in the form you expect. The move from cycle lows to $125,000 was the bull run. What happens next depends on liquidity and macro, not on headlines.
BTC is fundamentally strong. It has survived every “this time it’s different” crash narrative for over a decade. But that strength comes from its properties as an asset, not from any politician’s social media activity. The sooner people separate those two things in their heads, the less they will get chopped up buying news and wondering why the price went the other direction.