Galaxy Digital Predicts $250K Bitcoin Price by Year-End 2027

Notably, BTC hit an all-time high of $126,080 on Oct. 6, 2025.

But hopes for a breakout after the euphoria were “dashed by a market defined instead by rotation, repricing, and recalibration.”

According to the update from Galaxy Digital, a mix of macro letdowns, shifting investment narratives, “leverage wipeouts, and heavy whale distribution knocked the market off balance.”

The digital assets firm also stated that prices slipped, “confidence cooled, and by December, BTC had roundtripped back to the low $90,000s, though the path there was anything but flat.”

Although 2025 may end with prices in the red, the year still “pulled in real institutional adoption and set the groundwork for 2026’s next phase of real activation.”

In the coming year, Galaxy Digital expects stablecoins to “overtake legacy rails, tokenized assets to break into mainstream capital and collateral markets, and corporate L1s to move from pilots to real settlement.”

Further, they anticipate public chains will “rethink how they capture value, DeFi and prediction markets will keep expanding, and AI-driven payments will finally show up onchain.”

Some of Galaxy Research’s crypto market predictions for 2026 and key observations during 2025 are as follows.

• Bitcoin price: BTC will hit $250k by year-end 2027. 2026 is too chaotic to predict, though Bitcoin making new all-time highs in 2026 is still possible.Options markets are currently pricing about equal odds of $70k or $130k for month-end June 2026, and equal odds of $50k or $250k by year-end 2026. These wide ranges reflect uncertainty about the near term. At the time of writing, broader crypto is already deep in a bear market, and bitcoin has failed to firmly re-establish its bullish momentum. Until BTC firmly re-establishes itself above $100-$105k, we feel risk remains to the downside in the near term. Other factors in the broader financial markets also create uncertainty, such as the rate of AI capex deployment, monetary policy conditions, and the U.S. midterm elections in November.
• Over the course of the year, we have seen a structural decrease in the level of longer term BTC volatility – some of this move can be the introduction of larger overwriting/BTC yield generation programs. What is notable is that the BTC vol smile now prices puts in vol terms as more expensive than calls, which was not the case 6 months ago. This is to say, we are moving from a skew normally seen in developing, growth-y markets to markets seen in more traditional macro assets.
• This maturation will likely continue, and whether or not bitcoin bleeds lower towards the 200-week moving average, the asset class’s maturation and institutional adoption are only increasing. 2026 could be a boring year for Bitcoin, and whether it finishes at $70k or $150k, our bullish outlook (over longer time periods) is only growing stronger. Increasing institutional access is combining with relaxing monetary policy and a market in desperate search for non-dollar hedge assets. It’s very possible that bitcoin follows gold to become widely adopted as a monetary debasement hedge within the next two years. – Alex Thorn
• Layer-1s and Layer-2s: The total market cap of Internet Capital Markets on Solana will surge to $2 billion (it’s currently ~$750 million). Solana’s onchain economy is maturing, embodied by the ongoing shift away from meme-driven activity and the success of new launchpad models focused on directing capital to real revenue-generating businesses. This shift is reinforced by improving market structure on Solana and demand for tokens with fundamental value. As investor preference moves toward sustainable onchain businesses rather than ephemeral meme cycles, Internet Capital Markets will become a defining pillar of Solana’s economic activity. – Lucas Tcheyan
• At least one live, general-purpose Layer-1 blockchain will enshrine a revenue-generating application to funnel value directly back to its native token. A growing reassessment of how L1s capture and sustain value will push chains toward more opinionated designs. Hyperliquid’s success in enshrining a perpetuals exchange, and the broader shift in economic value capture away from protocols and toward applications (a realization of the Fat App Thesis), is reframing expectations of what a neutral base layer should provide. As applications increasingly retain the majority of the value they generate, more chains are exploring whether certain revenue-producing primitives should be embedded directly into the protocol to strengthen token-level economics. Early signals are already visible.
• Ethereum creator Vitalik Buterin’s recent call for low-risk, economically meaningful DeFi to justify ETH’s value highlights the pressure on L1s to demonstrate sustainable capture.MegaEth plans to launch a native stablecoin that would return revenue to validators, while Ambient’s forthcoming AI-focused L1 aims to internalize inference fees. These examples suggest growing willingness among chains to own and monetize key applications. This sets the stage for a major L1 to take the next step in 2026 by formally enshrining a revenue-generating application at the protocol layer and directing its economics to the native token. – Lucas Tcheyan