Bull market
 Image: original illustration, memecoin.wiki | |
| part of speech | noun |
|---|---|
| also called | bull run, the bull |
| opposite | bear market |
| notable crypto cycles | 2013, 2017, 2020 to 2021, 2024 to 2025 |
A bull market, or bull run, is a sustained period of rising crypto prices and expanding risk appetite, the season when attention, liquidity and normies flood into the market and the trenches do their biggest numbers.
A bull market, or bull run, is a sustained period of rising prices and expanding risk appetite. The term comes from traditional finance, where a bull attacks upward and a bear swipes downward, and crypto adopted both animals whole. In the trenches the bull market is the season that matters: the stretch of a cycle when new money, mainstream attention and normies arrive together, liquidity chases narratives, and meme coins do their most violent numbers.
Crypto cycles
Crypto bull markets have historically arrived in waves roughly four years apart, a rhythm widely attributed to the Bitcoin halving cutting new supply. Market histories mark the major runs at 2013, 2017 (the initial coin offering wave that carried Bitcoin near 20,000 dollars), 2020 to 2021 (the DeFi, NFT and first meme coin boom that carried it near 69,000 dollars), and the 2024 to 2025 cycle that followed the April 2024 halving and the spot Bitcoin ETF approvals. Analysts note that past rallies tended to peak roughly 500 to 550 days after a halving, and that institutional flows have made recent cycles less predictable than the retail driven ones before them. The meme coin supercycle debate, argued most prominently by Murad Mahmudov, is a claim about what this structure means for meme coins specifically: see Memecoin supercycle.
Life in a bull run
Inside the trenches a bull run has a recognizable feel. Launch counts and graduation rates climb, KOL calls move markets in minutes, floors of the cult coin rotation hold instead of bleeding, and each week produces a new headline runner. Retail search interest and app store rankings spike, exchange and wallet onboarding surges, and coins begin trending on mainstream social media rather than only on Crypto Twitter. Trench wisdom holds that the easiest money is made early in the run and given back late in it, when euphoria peaks, top signals stack up, and latecomers become exit liquidity.
Bear markets
The opposite condition is the bear market: prices grinding down or sideways, attention gone, launch activity collapsing, and only the most committed participants still active. Trench culture treats bear markets as the build season, when survivors accumulate, developers ship, and the vocabulary of the next run gets invented. The 2026 memecoin winter is the wiki's document of one such stretch. The transition points between the two seasons, the bottom nobody believes and the top everybody denies, are the most argued about moments in all of Crypto Twitter.
References
- https://www.kucoin.com/learn/crypto/the-history-of-bitcoin-bull-runs-and-crypto-market-cycles
- https://calebandbrown.com/blog/bitcoins-market-cycle/
- https://www.cryptohopper.com/blog/crypto-bull-run-history-key-factors-that-drove-past-rallies-12260
- https://bitcoin.tax/blog/crypto-market-cycles-2026/
- https://www.hashkey.com/en-US/glossary/bull-run
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