New research suggests that Bitcoin’s post-halving rallies were driven by global liquidity, not reduced coin issuance.
Bitcoin’s well-known post-halving price story is facing a serious rethink after strategist and researcher Shanaka Anslem Perera published an extensive analysis earlier this week arguing that every previous post-halving rally involved massive global liquidity shifts rather than the programmed reduction of new coins.
Perera claimed that the relationship between halvings and price appreciation is “statistically unprovable,” despite sixteen years of data.
His conclusion is blunt: Liquidity, not issuance cuts, has likely driven every major bull phase, and investors may be confusing correlation with causation.
A liquidity story hidden in a halving story
The essence of Perera’s argument rests on one distinction: while the halving mechanism that reduces issuance is predictable and baked into Bitcoin’s code, linking it to price increases has no statistical basis.
“The halving mechanism is mathematically verifiable with almost certainty. The causal relationship between halvings and the price cannot be proven statistically,” he wrote.
His report assessed Bitcoin data through December 2025 and previous liquidity episodes, noting that the first four halvings coincided with the 2013 Cyprus banking shock, continued post-crisis monetary expansion in 2016, and historic pandemic-era monetary injections after 2020.
Furthermore, the analyst highlighted how the 2024 price spike occurred before the April halving, undermining the conventional view that the event itself caused that bull run.
Instead, institutional inflows through newly approved spot Bitcoin ETFs seem a more plausible catalyst, fitting with Perera’s view that Bitcoin is now behaving less like a fixed-supply commodity and more like a high-beta macro asset.
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The author also pointed to a widely reported September 2024 study by analyst Lyn Alden, which calculated a statistical relationship of 0.94 between Bitcoin and the global M2 money supply dating back to 2013. However, he cautioned that a high degree of association is not evidence of a driving mechanism, arguing that rigorous econometric examination of these trend variables is still lacking.
He also noted that Bitcoin tends to rise during periods of expanding credit and fall sharply when liquidity tightens. According to him, a good example of such an event was the yen carry trade expiration in August 2024, when a rapid shift in Japanese yields put pressure on risk assets and sent Bitcoin plummeting.
Post-halving gains are declining while institutions are piling up
What’s striking about the recent market commentary is that even as new highs continued to emerge in 2025, the magnitude of any post-halving rally appears to be fading. Recent research from CoinGecko found that the 2017 cycle returned 29x, while the 2025 cycle was much smaller, although still positive.
Despite the dip, companies have continued to ramp up their purchases, with market leader Strategy acquiring another 10,624 BTC this week, bringing its holdings to over 660,000 BTC.
Meanwhile, regulatory shifts could shape future liquidity more than block rewards. Japan’s recently unveiled crypto framework could eventually channel significant household wealth into Bitcoin through ETFs and institutional funds if parliament approves the upcoming rule changes.
Together, these developments fuel Perera’s broader argument: the halving still determines Bitcoin’s scarcity schedule, but markets may be driven much more by global monetary conditions than just supply constraints.
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