On the day Bitcoin finally punched through $100,000, a lot of people did the same thing.
They screenshotted it.
They sent it to group chats, posted it with rocket emojis, and pulled up old tweets from 2021 to dust off the victory laps they had been saving for years. It felt like closure, like the market had walked all the way back to a promise it made a long time ago.
Then a chart started circulating, the kind of chart that quietly takes the wind out of the room.
It got amplified by the likes of Alex Thorn, head of research at Galaxy. The takeaway was simple, and a little cruel, if you were emotionally invested in the number itself.
If you adjust Bitcoin’s price for inflation, using 2020 dollars, Bitcoin never actually crossed $100,000. It topped just below it, around $99,848 in real terms.
That is not a dunk on Bitcoin, it is not a “gotcha” for anyone who cheered the milestone. It is a reminder that money changes underneath us, even when the sticker price stays the same.
And in this cycle, that difference matters more than people want to admit.
The number that moved while we were watching
If you ask most people what inflation does, they will say it makes things more expensive. That is true, but it is only half the story. The other half is that inflation changes what a dollar means.
A $100 bill in 2020 and a $100 bill in late 2025 do not buy the same basket of stuff, they do not carry the same weight, they do not represent the same amount of work, rent, groceries, or time.
Bitcoin trades in dollars, at least in the way most headlines describe it. So when Bitcoin hits a big round number, that number is tied to the value of the dollar at that moment, not the value of the dollar in your memory.
That sounds abstract until you put actual math on it.
Using the US CPI for CPI-U, the average level in 2020 was about 258.8, and by late 2025 the index is in the mid 320s. You can also see the 2020 annual averages directly in the BLS annual CPI table. That gap tells you the dollar lost a meaningful chunk of its purchasing power since 2020.
When you translate today’s nominal prices into 2020 dollars, you multiply by roughly 0.8, give or take depending on whether you use not seasonally adjusted CPIAUCNS or seasonally adjusted CPIAUCSL.
That means $100,000 in late 2025 dollars lines up closer to about $80,000 in 2020 dollars.
The milestone people were cheering was real, it just was not the same milestone the internet thinks it is.
If you want Bitcoin to be worth $100,000 in 2020 purchasing power today, the nominal price has to be closer to $125,000.
Which is awkward, because Bitcoin’s cycle peak landed in that neighborhood. Reuters has tracked the 2025 run in its Bitcoin 2025 price graphic, and plenty of coverage around the peak clustered in the $125,000 range.
If you plug the high into a simple CPI deflator, you get something that lands right on the edge of $100,000 in 2020 dollars. That is why the “did it or didn’t it” framing is a photo finish, and it can swing slightly based on methodology.
The deeper point holds either way.
The tape measure changed, and people kept arguing about the length.
Why this matters now, and why it will matter even more later
Normally, inflation-adjusted Bitcoin charts are a fun nerd exercise. This time, they are something closer to a reality check.
This cycle has been defined by institutions showing up through spot Bitcoin ETFs, a wave of macro narratives that kept flipping every few weeks, and a market that spent long stretches acting like it was tethered to rate expectations.
When you put Bitcoin’s price in real terms, you force the conversation into a place that institutions live all the time.
Real returns.
A pension fund does not care that an asset is up 20% in nominal terms if inflation is hot and the risk free rate is attractive. A treasury desk does not get paid for vibes. If Bitcoin wants to mature into a real macro asset, it eventually has to be judged the same way everything else is judged, which is what did you earn after inflation, and what did you earn relative to alternatives.
That is the part retail traders rarely think about when they are celebrating a round number, because round numbers feel like progress.
And to be fair, progress is real here.
Bitcoin went from being declared dead at $16,000 to pushing six figures again. That is not small. But the inflation adjusted lens changes how you describe what happened.
It tells you Bitcoin made a massive nominal comeback, and it also tells you the market has not pushed as far past its old psychological frontier as the headlines imply.
That is not bearish, it is just honest.
It also sets up the next chapter, because the “real” version of $100,000 keeps moving higher every month.
The weird twist, CPI itself got blurry right when Bitcoin peaked
There is another reason this whole debate has gotten traction, and it is almost poetic.
The inflation yardstick got messy this cycle.
During the 2025 lapse in appropriations, the Bureau of Labor Statistics said CPI operations were suspended for a period, and Reuters reported that the shutdown forced the cancellation of October’s CPI release, which was a first.
So you have this moment where the market is trying to judge whether Bitcoin truly reclaimed a historic level in real terms, and the inflation data needed to settle the argument got tangled up in a real world disruption.
Even when the data is available, there are choices. Seasonally adjusted CPIAUCSL, not seasonally adjusted CPIAUCNS, annual averages versus a specific month base, headline CPI versus other variants. None of these are wrong, but they produce slightly different answers, especially when you are dealing with a tight margin like $99,848 versus $100,000.
This is why it is a mistake to write a story that treats the inflation adjusted claim as a clean binary.
The story is bigger than that.
The story is that Bitcoin’s biggest milestone is no longer a fixed point, it is a moving target, and the macro backdrop has made the difference meaningful.
The market’s post peak hangover tells you people already feel it
The simplest way to tell whether a milestone had lasting power is what the market does after the celebration.
In this case, Bitcoin pulled back hard after the October high. By December, several market reports had Bitcoin down roughly 30% from the peak, and it stopped feeling like the $100,000 era was instantly stable.
The institutional wrapper told a similar story. US spot Bitcoin ETF AUM peaked around $169.5 billion on Oct. 6 and fell to roughly $120.7 billion by Dec. 4, according to CryptoSlate’s compilation of the data, using public trackers and fund reporting, you can see the details in CryptoSlate’s AUM breakdown, and cross-check it against chart hubs like The Block’s live ETF charts.
A lot of that is price impact rather than mass exits, but the direction still matters.
This is where the inflation-adjusted framing becomes useful again.
The market got close to the nominal price required to match a $100,000 real level in 2020 dollars, and it could not hold it. Maybe that was leverage getting washed out, maybe it was macro uncertainty, maybe it was simple exhaustion after a huge run.
Either way, the result is a market that did the hard part, breaking into six figures, and then struggled to convert the emotional win into a stable new floor.
That is how you get a cycle that feels like it changed everything, and also feels like it left something unfinished.
On-chain data says the foundation is stronger than the mood
Here is the part that keeps this from turning into a downer story.
Under the surface, Bitcoin’s cost basis picture looks sturdier than the price action suggests.
This year, Bitcoin’s realized cap hit a record of around $1.125 trillion, which is a way of saying more coins are sitting at higher cost bases than ever before. Realized cap is not a magic indicator, but it does capture something real about adoption and long-term holders. It suggests the network is absorbing capital at higher levels over time.
So you have a market that, in real purchasing power terms, is still arguing about whether it truly cleared a historic line, and you also have a market where the underlying “average paid” is rising and setting new records.
These can both be true.
It is one reason Bitcoin keeps surviving these emotional whiplash cycles. The price is volatile, and the foundation quietly thickens.
What comes next, three paths that matter more than the next candle
If you take the inflation-adjusted lens seriously, the question stops being “did Bitcoin hit $100,000” and becomes “what has to happen for Bitcoin to deliver meaningfully new real highs.”
There are three broad ways this can play out over the next year, and none of them depend on vibes.
1) Disinflation and easing make nominal highs matter again
If inflation cools along the path policymakers have projected, and the Fed starts cutting more confidently, the nominal hurdle for real milestones rises more slowly. In that world, a return to the prior nominal peak carries more real meaning. The market gets to keep more of what it earns.
If you want to anchor that in official forecasts, the Fed’s Summary of Economic Projections lays out inflation expectations out through 2028.
2) Inflation stays sticky and the market prints nominal highs that feel hollow
If inflation runs hotter than expected, or data uncertainty keeps markets jumpy, you can end up with a cycle where Bitcoin makes new nominal highs and still does not look impressive in purchasing power terms.
It is also a world where higher real yields remain a headwind. When real yields are attractive, holding any volatile asset has a higher opportunity cost. You can track that macro pressure through measures like the 10 year TIPS real yield.
3) ETF demand re accelerates and brute forces a real breakout
Citi’s framework for 2026 includes a base case around $143,000, a bull case above $189,000, and a bear case around $78,500, with ETF flows and adoption sitting near the center of the story. MarketWatch summarized that forecast here, Citi’s $143,000 call.
You do not have to treat those numbers as destiny to take the structure seriously.
If ETF demand reaccelerates, the market can push through the inflation-adjusted hurdles even if the macro environment is messy. The thing to watch is not just price, it is whether ETF assets and flows shift into a new regime rather than bouncing around with the same momentum cycles we have already seen.
The human part, this is what inflation does to every dream measured in dollars
People do not get emotional about CPI indices. They get emotional about milestones.
A first home. A six-figure salary. A retirement number. A Bitcoin price target.
Inflation is the quiet force that makes you hit the goal and still feel like you are behind, because the goal moved while you were running toward it.
That is what makes this chart sting. It is not telling you Bitcoin failed, it is telling you the world changed.
Bitcoin is often sold as a hedge against that kind of change, a way to step outside the slow leak of fiat purchasing power. So it is fitting, in a darkly funny way, that the most famous fiat milestone in Bitcoin history is also the one inflation quietly rewrote.
If you want one more macro hook for that backdrop, Reuters noted the dollar’s rough year in late 2025 reporting, including a sharp annual slide tied to looser policy expectations.
If you want a clean takeaway, it is this.
Six figures was a big moment, it still is, and the next real milestone is already higher than most people think. If Bitcoin wants to feel like it is entering a new era, it will have to clear levels that sound a little absurd today, partly because Bitcoin is Bitcoin, partly because the dollar keeps shrinking in real terms.
That is the part that makes this story bigger than a chart.
The next time Bitcoin hits a round number, the first question worth asking is not whether the number is real, it is what the number buys.
The post Fact check: Bitcoin never really hit $100,000 in 2025 when you apply real world data appeared first on CryptoSlate.
