Bitcoin has been cited as failing to regain its record high mainly because of speculative noise within the industry and a weak product structure.

On June 30 (local time), blockchain media outlet U.Today reported that Tether adviser Gabor Gurbacs (가보르 구르바치스) said bitcoin’s weakness stems not from a technical problem but from damage to discussion and capital flows in the crypto industry.

Gurbacs said bitcoin’s value in the current market is effectively flowing out within the industry. He said much of the crypto market has been eaten away by weak derivatives products and short-term participants focused on clickbait and short-lived overheating, rather than building infrastructure and expanding distribution. He argued the ecosystem around bitcoin is being swayed more by short-term speculative demand than by long-term value accumulation.

He drew a clear line between today’s market and the bitcoin community before 2017. The early bitcoin ecosystem operated on cypherpunk principles, the concept of “hard money” and professional capital-market participants, but that character has now weakened significantly, he said. Gurbacs described participants at the time as “deeper, principled and purpose-driven.”

As a paradox of the current cycle, the outlet pointed to a divergence in flows between bitcoin and traditional assets. The S&P 500, the Nasdaq 100-tracking QQQ and gold have continued to set new records, but bitcoin remains below its peak. Even if institutional money has entered the market, excessive speculative noise has piled up inside it, preventing funds from settling into long-term value, it said.

Supply pressure has also weighed on bitcoin’s price. Based on a “institutional absorption versus early holder distribution” model, net inflows last week posted the worst result of this cycle. The model’s cumulative balance fell to -154,169 BTC after a peak in October 2025. The outlet presented this as showing institutional demand is not absorbing enough selling by existing holders.

Gurbacs did not deny bitcoin’s long-term competitiveness itself. He stressed that the essence of the current problem lies not in technology but in the quality of participants seeking to speculate on top of it. He said market structure and how the ecosystem allocates capital are weighing more heavily than the bitcoin network or the asset’s characteristics.

In this situation, the focal point in the bitcoin market is less the size of institutional inflows than how long that money can be sustained within the ecosystem. If supply pressure does not ease and speculative noise does not decline, bitcoin could continue to move differently from traditional assets, a warning that can be read from the situation. On the other hand, if the market’s focus shifts back to infrastructure, distribution and areas linked to real assets, the outlet said the current stagnation range could also change.