After a year filled with high expectations and visible disappointment, two of the most recognizable voices in crypto are striking a noticeably calmer tone about what comes next.
Anthony Scaramucci, the founder of SkyBridge Capital, openly admitted something many market participants quietly felt throughout 2025.
He expected Bitcoin to break out decisively this year. The setup looked perfect on paper, regulatory clarity improving, sentiment turning, bold price targets circulating. Instead, Bitcoin spent much of the year consolidating, with price action lagging optimism and sentiment turning sour.
That gap between expectations and reality mattered. Rather than accelerating into a euphoric phase, the market stalled. And according to Scaramucci, that mismatch is exactly why the next phase looks different.
He now sees 2026 not as a year of fireworks, but as a year of repair.
SCARAMUCCI & NOVOGRATZ: 2026 IS ABOUT HEALING, NOT HYPE
Anthony Scaramucci admitted what a lot of people won’t. He thought 2025 would be the breakout year for #Bitcoin. Regulatory tailwinds, sentiment shift, $150K — and instead we’re sitting near $88K with sentiment clearly… pic.twitter.com/UNSk6sklZD
— CryptosRus (@CryptosR_Us) December 24, 2025
A Market That Didn’t Behave as Expected
That view is strongly echoed by Mike Novogratz, CEO of Galaxy and one of the earliest institutional champions of crypto. Novogratz didn’t sugarcoat the situation. In his words, sentiment is bad, not because crypto is broken, but because the market didn’t do what it was “supposed” to do.
Bitcoin already printed an all-time high, yet the follow-through never arrived. Instead of sustained momentum, the market slipped into frustration. Novogratz sees this as a classic post-cycle reset rather than a failure.
Importantly, he’s not worried about Bitcoin having already peaked.
From his perspective, too much has been built for the asset class to simply fade away, capital commitments, institutional involvement, custody infrastructure, and global participation don’t vanish because one year underdelivered.
Why Infrastructure Matters More Than Price Right Now
Where Novogratz remains genuinely optimistic isn’t price targets – it’s infrastructure.
He points to a powerful trend happening quietly, especially outside the United States: the rise of next-generation financial platforms. These aren’t just crypto exchanges. They’re emerging ecosystems that blend crypto assets, tokenized stocks, prediction markets, and banking-like services into a single interface.
That build-out hasn’t slowed. In many regions, it’s accelerating.
The comparison Novogratz uses is telling. After the internet bubble burst, the biggest winners weren’t the loudest companies, they were the ones laying cables, building servers, and quietly constructing the pipes that everything else would later run on.
In his view, crypto is in that same phase now.
The Bigger Picture for 2026
Taken together, Scaramucci and Novogratz aren’t calling for excitement – they’re calling for patience.
2026, in their eyes, isn’t about chasing narratives or explosive price moves. It’s about markets stabilizing, confidence gradually rebuilding, and infrastructure catching up to the ambitions that got ahead of themselves in prior years.
That doesn’t mean upside is gone. It means the foundation is being reinforced first.
And historically, those are the periods that end up mattering most, even if they feel quiet while they’re happening.
