Crypto darling no more? Bitcoin drops from its high as market panics

The world's first, largest, and most expensive cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, has slid below $92,000 (€79,000) a coin, wiping more than 25% off its value since it hit record highs above $126,000 (€108,700) last month.

The dramatic decline is almost a textbook example of what it looks like to enter a bear market phase. That's an industry term for when an asset falls so sharply it resembles the downward claw swipe of a bear.

Within the past 24 hours alone, Bitcoin traded as low as $89,471 (€77,210) or almost 30% below its late October peak, with the market recovering slightly in early trading on Tuesday.

“Bitcoin is extending losses, trading at around $90k, shedding around 2%, fuelled by concerns about overvaluations in the tech sector and broader risk-off sentiment that is causing a ripple effect across global markets," explained Victoria Scholar, head of investment at the Interactive investor.

Despite a blistering rally into early October, all of Bitcoin's gains this year have been erased and it is now trading below where it started in January.

"Bitcoin has now turned negative for 2025...fears of an AI bubble and concerns about the market’s heavy dependence on a handful of tech giants have caused investors to dial back their exposure to speculative assets such as Bitcoin," Scholar explained.

The fall comes despite the presence of a crypto-friendly president in the White House, a less enforcement-minded chair at the Securities and Exchange Commission, and a new stablecoin — crypto tied to currency — legislation on the books.

The risks of a decentralised currency

Blockchain currencies such as Bitcoin are built on a digital ledger rather than a physical system tied to a central bank or government, and this ledger records every transaction across a large network of computers. Thousands of these machines or nodes hold copies of the ledger and update it together.

Transactions are grouped into “blocks” — hence “blockchain” — and checked using cryptography before being added to the chain in a permanent, tamper-resistant sequence. This design makes the system transparent and very hard to alter, because changing any record would mean rewriting the entire chain on most of the participating computers.

All of this means that investors who are already on edge due to wider market volatility are quick to dump volatile assets like Bitcoin at the first sign of bad news in order to reduce their exposure.

"There’s a general sense of nervousness that has captured the market mood lately and Bitcoin appears to be in the firing line... riskier non-yielding assets like Bitcoin look less attractive in a higher interest rate environment,” Scholar explained.

Bitcoin's defenders, such as billionaire investor Michael Saylor, have nonetheless welcomed the drop. Some claim it will flush out wealthy investors who do not understand or appreciate Bitcoin's culture of long-term commitment and active engagement.

"Volatility is a gift to the faithful. It scares away the tourist, it scares away the lazy, it scares away the people that are already conventionally rich that have all the money," Saylor said in a statement following the recent numbers.

Saylor and other die-hard Bitcoin believers say that those who are willing to study the market, stay invested through volatility, and participate in the daily ebb and flow of trading should be the ones benefitting the most from it — and not the casual spectators.

Saylor's Strategy Inc., formerly MicroStrategy, bought 8,178 additional coins of Bitcoin between 10-16 November 2025 at an average price of around $102,171 or €88,000 each, spending roughly $835.6 million (€721.15mn) in total.