The wave of predictions at the beginning of the year still lingers vividly—major institutions and investment giants were all confident, claiming BTC would hit 200,000 and ETH would break $10,000. Looking back now, it was purely a collective face slap.

As of mid-December, Bitcoin hovered around $87,400, and Ethereum was only $2,926, a huge gap from those bold promises. This prediction failure can be considered the best anti-example of the year and is definitely worth reviewing carefully.

The relatively rational ones include Michael Saylor’s forecast, which wasn’t too far off—MicroStrategy’s goal at the start of the year was for BTC to break $100,000. Later, at the end of November, it indeed hit a new high of $99,800, but it never managed to stay above six figures. However, Saylor didn’t pay much attention to short-term fluctuations and kept talking about the long-term story, often mentioning Bitcoin reaching a million dollars, which is a classic big-picture narrative that hasn’t changed over the years. Mark Yusko was similar; his target of $150,000 ended up feeling a bit awkward in the end.

The most outrageous predictions came from investment banks and top analysts. Fundstrat’s Tom Lee directly threw out a $250,000 target, citing continuous institutional inflows and the four-year halving cycle as reasons for the rise. But the reality? The market didn’t follow the script after the halving, and BTC only rose to over $90,000 before starting to fluctuate. Standard Chartered Bank and AllianceBernstein also called for $200,000, with Standard Chartered even confidently claiming mid-year that it could be achieved by the end of the year. But as everyone saw—just a few days before the year’s end—these targets had already become a joke.