Some market forecasts that bitcoin (BTC) could fall to $40,000 drew a rebuttal from on-chain analyst James Check, who called it "statistically almost unprecedented." He said it was an extreme price level even by historical data standards, beyond a simple bearish scenario.

CoinDesk, a blockchain media outlet, reported on April 25 that Check stressed the need to compare recent calls for a drop to $40,000 with bitcoin's long-term price distribution.

Bitcoin has rebounded about 15 percent this month, but the market remains divided on whether it has exited a bear market. After entering a bear market in October last year, bitcoin at one point rose above $126,000, but later plunged more than 50 percent to around $60,000 in February this year. It has recently traded around $78,000, showing a rebound, but is still about 40 percent below its all-time high.

Against that backdrop, some forecasts say bitcoin could fall to $40,000. That would be about a 70 percent drop from its all-time high. Check said such bearish calls require closer scrutiny.

Check countered the claim using the Mean Reversion Index (MRI). The index combines key on-chain indicators, including the 200-week exponential moving average (EMA), realized price, Power Law trend and volume-weighted average price (VWAP), and shows the current price's historical position in percentiles.

He said that if bitcoin falls to $40,000, it would correspond to the 0.4th percentile of the entire distribution based on daily closing prices. Check described it as "a level that sits even below the range of meaningful deviation from all major baselines" and "an extreme zone that is hard to find even in past data."

He also offered a comparison. Check said that under current market conditions, $40,000 would be similar to bitcoin trading below $2 in 2011. By contrast, the recent price level is about the 31.5th percentile, which he said is a bearish move but still within the typical range of a correction.

He did not completely rule out the possibility itself. Check said, "There is no case of a zero probability in markets," but added that the $40,000 scenario would be "close to an almost unprecedented outcome."

In the market, uncertainty persists over whether the bear market has ended despite the recent rebound. Check's analysis is seen as highlighting that a plunge to around $40,000 could be a historically rare extreme case rather than a simple correction, rather than denying the possibility of further declines.

Attention is therefore expected to focus on whether bitcoin will form a bottom within the current correction range, or be pushed back into a statistically rare sharp-drop scenario.