By December 2025, Bitcoin is once again playing out the same old story—after reaching a high of $90,360 in November, it continued to decline, falling below $84,000 in mid-December. In one day, global investors were liquidated for $591 million, with 193,000 people exiting the market. Last early morning, it dropped again to around $85,000. This seems to have become a pattern.

Looking back at history makes it clear. Before Christmas 2018, Bitcoin fell from $6,000 all the way down to $3,815. During that same period in 2022, the FTX crash coincided with the Christmas cycle, causing Bitcoin to halve to $16,831. Even in 2014 and 2015, it didn't escape the pre-holiday correction. This is not coincidence but an inevitable result of multiple factors—quarterly contract settlements, institutional fund year-end repatriation, and traders' risk aversion before holidays—all piling up together.

**Data Speaks: The Christmas Effect Is Not a Myth**

Don’t rely on intuition; look at the data. Using Bitcoin as a sample (it accounts for over 58% of the total crypto market cap and is a market indicator), analyzing 15 Christmas cycles from 2010 to 2024, there were 11 instances of decline in early to mid-December, followed by narrow sideways movement in late December. The probability of decline is 73.3%.

Interestingly, the years 2021 to 2023 all fell into this pattern—pre-holiday corrections are a must. Only 2024 broke this curse because of the dual positive factors of the Fed’s rate cut expectations and the approval of Bitcoin spot ETFs, which forcibly overturned the pattern. This instead confirms a key point: macroeconomic environment is the core variable.