Jan van Eck, CEO of asset manager and ETF issuer VanEck, said Bitcoin may be approaching a more difficult phase in 2026 if its historical cycle remains intact and adoption does not accelerate meaningfully. Speaking with Anthony Pompliano in an interview released May 28, van Eck framed the issue less as a rejection of Bitcoin’s long-term case and more as a question of whether the market has enough new demand to justify a break from prior cycle behavior.
VanEck CEO Warns Bitcoin Cycle May Turn in 2026
Van Eck’s central argument was that Bitcoin’s price path should not be assumed to change dramatically unless the underlying adoption story changes. VanEck, described in the interview as a roughly $200 billion asset manager and one of the major ETF firms, has direct exposure to the institutionalization of crypto through its ETF business, including spot Bitcoin products. That makes van Eck’s comments notable for professional investors tracking whether ETF flows are sufficient to alter Bitcoin’s historical market rhythm.
“I think it’s impossible to say Bitcoin should do X, Y, or Z. The reason I got interested in it in 2017 is it’s its own thing, and it’s going to evolve as adoption changes. Now, what has changed in the adoption story in the last two years? Nothing,” van Eck said. He added that “central banks haven’t come on board” and “corporations haven’t come on board,” while most recent buying has come from financial investors using ETFs rather than a broad institutional wave.
Van Eck linked the potential 2026 weakness to Bitcoin’s four-year cycle, which is commonly associated with the halving-driven reduction in miner rewards. “Limited supply, like gold, for your halving cycle has driven because that’s the amount of Bitcoin that miners get to run the network. That has caused a decline, right, in their profitability and a decline every four years in Bitcoin. Guess what? 2026 is the year of decline in Bitcoin,” he said. He did not give a specific price target, and he also emphasized that he remains long-term bullish.
Jan van Eck Questions Bitcoin Adoption Momentum
A major part of van Eck’s caution centered on adoption quality. While he acknowledged that asset allocators have gradually begun including Bitcoin after ETF approvals, he said the shift has not been dramatic enough to make him assume the cycle will automatically be broken. “It’s basically been some financial investors through the ETFs, but not many institutions. Slowly, asset allocators have started to include it, but not dramatic. So why would you expect some big change in the price of Bitcoin when nothing has happened?” he said.
He also pointed to Bitcoin’s changing correlation profile as a factor that may restrain institutional allocations. “It’s been a negative to me that Bitcoin has had this higher correlation to the Nasdaq since COVID. It used to have zero, literally zero correlation, and now it’s had a 0.6 correlation, which is really high. A correlation of one is the identical performance,” van Eck said. In his view, allocators may still be open to Bitcoin, particularly after ETF approval, but higher correlation can lead them to choose smaller allocations.
Pompliano pushed back by arguing that Bitcoin adoption may depend on time, normalization, and generational turnover inside financial institutions rather than a single catalyst. Van Eck appeared receptive to the idea that Bitcoin is undergoing a change in ownership base, comparing the process to a long transition in which early holders gradually give way to institutional investors. Even so, his near-term view remained measured: he said he was “a buyer of Bitcoin this quarter” after being “a seller in January,” while maintaining that 2026 could still be the cycle’s weaker year if adoption does not materially broaden.
Van Eck’s comments place the Bitcoin market’s next phase squarely on the question of adoption rather than narrative alone. For traders and allocators, the key takeaway is not that VanEck’s CEO has abandoned the long-term Bitcoin thesis, but that he sees limited evidence so far that ETFs, by themselves, have changed the asset’s historical cycle or its increasingly equity-like behavior.
AI Transparency Note: This article was prepared with the assistance of an AI system based on the sources listed and was reviewed, edited, and approved by a human editor before publication. All quotes, data points, and factual claims are intended to be grounded in the cited source material; however, errors cannot be ruled out entirely.