US stock market hits new highs, but BTC weakens—this doesn't mean fundamentals are worsening: capital is rotating, not leaving crypto.

Recently, the US stock market has been hitting new highs, but Bitcoin's performance this year has been relatively weak, appearing like a "decoupled market."

However, some institutions interpret this as: it's not that the crypto industry is weakening, but that capital is being redistributed.

Hashdex believes that current market capital is flowing more toward main themes like AI infrastructure, IPOs, and interest rate trading, rather than digital assets themselves. But if you look at on-chain data, the crypto network is actually not weak: stablecoin transaction volume has already surpassed last year's full-year level, the scale of RWA (real-world asset tokenization) has grown over 60% this year, and on-chain transaction activity is also hitting new highs.

In other words, surface prices and on-chain fundamentals are "temporarily diverging."

Charles Schwab, on the other hand, explains Bitcoin's trend from a cyclical perspective, believing it is still in a typical post-halving recovery phase. Historically, Bitcoin often takes a long time to climb back above miners' cost, which is currently around $95k. The market's average cost basis is about $80k, meaning upward moves may still face selling pressure from those breaking even.

They also add that while the four-year halving cycle isn't a hard rule, it does influence market behavior over the long term. As the market matures, future volatility may be lower than in the past, but the cyclical logic will not completely disappear.

One sentence summary: Capital hasn't left crypto—it's just rotating among different assets, and Bitcoin is still in the middle of its cyclical recovery phase.