Bitcoin plunged below $90,000 on Tuesday Hong Kong time on Coinbase, extending a sell-off that has now erased its entire 2025 gains and pushed sentiment into one of its most depressed readings of the cycle.
The drop to $89,420, its lowest level since February, comes just six weeks after prices hit a record high of $126,250, marking a sharp reversal.
The decline accelerated after Bitcoin failed to reclaim key support at $93,700 over the weekend, falling below its 200-day moving average and triggering a “death crossover” between the 50-day and 200-day trendlines.
This signal, while imperfect, tends to coincide with multi-week drawdowns when accompanied by evaporation of liquidity and stagnation of ETF inflows – both now visible.
Flows into U.S. cash ETFs, which absorbed more than $25 billion earlier in the year, were flat for nearly two weeks on concerns that the Trump administration’s tariff program could inject a new round of inflation and delay Federal Reserve rate cuts.
Buyers on corporate balance sheets, who had accumulated aggressively during the first half of the year, also suspended their purchases.
Retail stress is growing. The crypto Fear & Greed Index fell to 11 on Monday, its lowest reading since the 2022 bear market, signaling “extreme fear.”
Bitcoin’s social dominance, the share of market talk tied to BTC, has increased, a trend that historically appears near local capitulation events, as traders abandon altcoins to focus on the benchmark asset.
Analysts warn that failure to recover $93,000 in the near term leaves a clear liquidity pocket between $86,000 and $88,000.
Still, some note that confidence shocks of this magnitude often precede bouts of near-term relief if ETF outflows stabilize and macroeconomic data becomes less hawkish in the coming weeks.
Just noise
According to Dan Tapiero, investor and founder of growth equity fund 50T Holdings, some of the buying pressure that traditionally helped drive up the price of bitcoin may now spill over into real-world stablecoins and tokenized assets.
He nevertheless remains confident in the asset’s long-term prospects, supported by strong fundamentals and growing institutional interest. For him, short-term uncertainty is just noise, he says.
