Bitget CEO's Bitcoin Prediction: The US Isn't Buying BTC, and 2025 Won't Have a Parabolic Rally

The US government isn't going to buy Bitcoin. Not this year, not next year, probably not ever in the form the market keeps dreaming about. That's the blunt takeaway from Bitget CEO Gracy Chen's latest forecast, and honestly, it's the most realistic thing anyone in crypto leadership has said in months.

What the Evidence Actually Shows

Chen's prediction isn't complicated. She sees macroeconomic uncertainty keeping Bitcoin within $10,000 to $20,000 of its current levels by the end of 2025. That's not a crash call and it's not a moonshot. It's a range-bound, chop-heavy, sideways grind that most retail traders absolutely hate.

Her reasoning centers on the Federal Reserve's wait-and-see posture. Inflation hasn't fully normalized. The labor market is cooling but not collapsing. The Fed's dot plot keeps shifting, and every time those projections move, risk assets like Bitcoin feel the whip. You can't have a sustained breakout when the macro backdrop keeps changing the rules every six weeks.

And then there's the government angle. The market spent late 2024 and early 2025 convincing itself that a Trump administration would start stacking sats like a retail degens with a Coinbase account. The reality is far more complicated. The White House signed an executive order in March 2025 to create a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, but it's built entirely from Bitcoin already seized in criminal and civil forfeiture cases. There's no active purchase program. There's no budget line item for buying BTC. The US government holds what it holds, and it's unclear they even want to hold that.

Chen's two-year timeline for any actual US purchases feels generous, if anything. Congress moves slowly. The BITCOIN Act, which would direct the Treasury to buy 200,000 BTC annually for five years, is still sitting in committee without a clear path to a vote. The political capital required to allocate tens of billions of taxpayer dollars to a volatile digital asset is enormous, and that's before you factor in opposition from banking committees, fiscal hawks, and every talking head on financial television.

So the evidence stacks up. Macro uncertainty caps the upside. Government buying isn't happening soon. The most likely scenario is a market that grinds sideways, builds a base, and waits for something real to move it.

The Bull Case I Keep Hearing

Look, I get the counterargument. It's not stupid. There's a real faction inside the administration that genuinely believes Bitcoin is a strategic asset. Senator Cynthia Lummis has been pushing the BITCOIN Act with real conviction. Some state pension funds are already allocating small percentages to crypto. The narrative is powerful: Bitcoin as digital gold, a hedge against dollar debasement, a generational store of value that the US can't afford to ignore.

And there are legitimate catalysts. If the Fed cuts rates in the second half of 2025, liquidity returns to risk assets. If a major bank gets approved to custody Bitcoin directly, institutional flows could accelerate. If the BITCOIN Act somehow gains traction, the supply shock would be unprecedented.

But here's the thing: none of those are base cases. They're possibilities. And the market has already priced a lot of this optimism in. When Trump won the election, Bitcoin jumped to $109,000 on the assumption that his administration would be aggressively pro-crypto. That hasn't materialized as quickly as the market hoped, and BTC has since settled back into a range around $90,000 to $100,000 region. The excitement didn't match the execution.

There's also a deeper problem with the strategic reserve narrative. Who actually benefits from a US Bitcoin stockpile if the government is prohibited from selling it? The executive order specifically bars the sale of seized Bitcoin, which means it sits there indefinitely, generating zero liquidity for the Treasury while exposing taxpayers to massive mark-to-market swings. That's not a strategy. That's a liability wearing a trench coat.

My Verdict: The Grind Is Bullish

I'm going to take a contrarian position here, and it's not the one you'd expect from a crypto journalist. Chen's boring, range-bound forecast is actually the healthiest thing that could happen to this market.

Think about it. The 2024 cycle was defined by ETF approval euphoria and policy optimism. Everyone was chasing the same trade: institutions are coming, regulators are softening, Bitcoin is going to $200,000. That narrative produced a melt-up, and melt-ups always end ugly. The correction from $109,000 back to the mid-$90,000s was painful for late buyers and new entrants who got seduced by the headlines.

A flat, consolidating market flushes out the weak hands. It forces projects to justify their valuations with actual usage instead of token price momentum. It pushes exchanges to focus on real revenue, not just listing fees from meme coins with a half-life of three weeks. It resets expectations to something sustainable.

And it gives the regulatory apparatus time to catch up. HIPAA and immutability don't play well together. Yet. But the more time we've, the more likely policymakers actually understand what they're regulating. The market needs that. It needs compliance frameworks that aren't just enforcement actions against the last exchange that filed its paperwork wrong.

What would change my mind? If the BITCOIN Act suddenly moves out of committee with a date attached, I'd shift my view fast. If the Fed signals a deeper cutting cycle than current futures pricing suggests, you could see a liquidity-driven breakout. But those are trades, not investments. Fundamentals don't support a parabolic move in 2025, and pretending otherwise is how people lose money.

The government's $20 billion in seized Bitcoin isn't going anywhere. The mining sector is struggling with post-halving margins. The ETF flows have stabilized rather than surged. The market is telling you something with its lack of direction, and the smart move is listening instead of fighting it.

Patient consent doesn't belong in a centralized database, and Bitcoin's price discovery doesn't belong in a political promise. Both need time, verification, and a lot less noise. Chen's forecast isn't exciting. It's probably right. And that's fine, because the next real leg up will come from actual adoption, not presidential tweets.