Interestingly, leading investment banks recently mentioned a hypothesis in their year-end reports — that Bitcoin might be brewing a prolonged downtrend, potentially plunging into a "winter" by 2026. While this outlook sounds pessimistic, the underlying logic is worth pondering: market dominance is quietly shifting from retail-driven to institutional control. Interestingly, decentralized finance (DeFi) has not stagnated; various DeFi projects continue to accelerate their iterations. This indicates that the entire ecosystem is diverging — prices may face pressure, but infrastructure and application layers are actually laying the groundwork.