Market News

(Bloomberg) -- Bitcoin dropped below $86,000 for the first time in two weeks, with investor sentiment weakening as the largest cryptocurrency slips deeper into bear market territory.

Bitcoin has been drifting toward the lower bound of its recent trading range with any bounce in price being met by selling from investors who purchased the original cryptocurrency near the all-time high reached in early October, analysts said.

Bitcoin fell as much as 3.7% to $85,171 on Monday. It regained some ground in Asia Tuesday morning before retreating to $85,575 just after noon in Hong Kong. It is down around 30% from its record high of more than $126,000.  

“We’ve continued to trade this very choppy range between 85k-94k in BTC, with a continued lack of interest and low volumes broadly across crypto markets,” said Bohan Jiang, senior derivatives trader at FalconX.

Bitcoin has continued to fall with other risk assets in recent weeks but hasn’t rebounded when they have, breaking its usual upside correlation. The slide highlights what analysts see as a market squeezed by weak liquidity and fading risk appetite even after the Federal Reserve’s rate cut last week.

The last full trading week of 2025 started with stocks, bonds and the dollar wavering as Wall Street geared up for key economic data that will help shape the Fed’s rate outlook.

Bitcoin’s decline stands apart from recent selloffs because it’s being driven by spot and derivatives positioning rather than forced liquidations, said Chris Newhouse, director of research at Ergonia, a firm specializing in decentralized finance.

Relatively muted liquidation data suggests that over-leveraged positions have already been flushed, leaving behind a more organic, but potentially more persistent, form of selling pressure, Newhouse said.

That hasn’t stopped Michael Saylor’s Strategy Inc. from buying more Bitcoin. The original digital asset treasury company said earlier Monday that it acquired almost $1 billion in Bitcoin for a second consecutive week.

The majority of Strategy’s most recent acquisitions were made using proceeds from at-the-market sales of its Class A common stock. Critics of Saylor’s model have raised concern that selling the shares is diluting existing equity of shareholders and eroding the formally high premium the stock garnered over its now roughly $59 billion Bitcoin holdings. The Tysons Corner, Virginia-based company also sold shares of three of its four classes of perpetual preferred shares to fund the purchases.

Other cryptocurrencies fell more on Monday. Ether, Doge and XRP each dropped around 5%, while shares of crypto-related companies also slumped. Strategy dropped more than 9% at one point and Coinbase Global Inc. slipped around 7%.

The latest selloff led to liquidations of about $520 million worth of bullish bets across all tokens in the past 24 hours, Coinglass data shows.

Bitcoin touched a 2025 low of around $74,400 in April, after President Donald Trump’s initial tariff plan upended financial markets worldwide.

--With assistance from Judy Lagrou and Sidhartha Shukla.

(Updates with liquidations data)