Bitcoin’s familiar post-halving price story is facing a serious rethink after strategist and researcher Shanaka Anslem Perera published a lengthy analysis earlier in the week, arguing that every previous post-halving rally lined up with massive global liquidity shifts rather than the programmed reduction of new coins.
Perera contended that the relationship between halvings and price appreciation is “statistically unprovable” despite sixteen years of data.
His takeaway is blunt: liquidity, not issuance cuts, has likely guided every major bull phase, and investors may be mistaking correlation for causation.
A Liquidity Story Hiding Inside a Halving Narrative
The substance 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 jumps has no statistical foundation.
“The halving mechanism is mathematically verifiable to near certainty. The causal relationship between halvings and price is statistically unprovable,” he wrote.
His report reviewed Bitcoin data through December 2025 and earlier liquidity episodes, noting that the first four halvings coincided with the Cyprus banking shock in 2013, lingering post-crisis money expansion in 2016, and historic pandemic-era monetary injections after 2020.
Further, the analyst highlighted how the 2024 price peak occurred before the April halving, undermining the conventional view that the event itself triggered that bull run.
Instead, institutional inflows via newly approved spot Bitcoin ETFs appear as a more plausible catalyst, matching with Perera’s view that Bitcoin now behaves less like a fixed-supply commodity and more like a high-beta macro asset.
The author also pointed to a widely circulated September 2024 study from analyst Lyn Alden, which calculated a 0.94 statistical relationship between Bitcoin and Global M2 money supply going back to 2013. He warned, however, that a high degree of association is not proof of a driving mechanism, arguing that rigorous econometric scrutiny of these trending 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 August 2024 yen carry trade unwind, when a rapid shift in Japanese rates hammered risk assets and sent Bitcoin tumbling.
Post-Halving Gains Are Shrinking While Institutions Accumulate
What stands out across recent market commentary is that, even as new highs kept coming in 2025, the size of each post-halving rally appears to be fading. Recent research by CoinGecko found that the 2017 cycle returned 29x, while the 2025 run has been much smaller, although still positive.
Despite the dip, companies have continued to ramp up buying, with market leader Strategy acquiring another 10,624 BTC this week, bringing its holdings to over 660,000 BTC.
Meanwhile, regulatory shifts may shape future liquidity more than block rewards. Japan’s newly unveiled crypto framework could eventually channel sizable household wealth into Bitcoin through ETFs and institutional funds if parliament approves forthcoming rule changes.
Together, these developments feed Perera’s wider argument: the halving still defines Bitcoin’s scarcity schedule, but markets may be driven far more by global money conditions than supply cuts alone.