What the Hell Just Happened, and Whether We’re All Going to Make It
November 2025 did its best to murder crypto in cold blood.
Bitcoin fell from a euphoric $108,400 all-time high to $86,000 in under five weeks. Ethereum lost more than a quarter of its value before most people finished their Thanksgiving leftovers. The entire market evaporated more than one trillion dollars in market cap, roughly the GDP of the Netherlands, gone. Altcoins that were “guaranteed 100× moonshots” in October are now down 80 to 95 percent. The Fear & Greed Index sits at 24, which is the polite way of saying collective panic.
So let’s do the autopsy, then decide if the patient is dead or just violently hungover.
How It All Unraveled
The party was raging on Halloween. Bitcoin was printing new highs, retail was piling in at the exact top (Google searches for “buy Bitcoin” peaked the same week as price, always a kiss-of-death signal), and leverage across exchanges had reached absurd levels. Funding rates on perpetual futures were running above 100 percent annualized in places. People were literally paying ten percent a month just to stay long.
Then the music stopped.
MicroStrategy shocked everyone with an earnings miss and admitted Bitcoin impairment charges were starting to sting the balance sheet. The biggest corporate whale bled in public, and the stock gapped down eighteen percent overnight. A week later, on November 25, Bitcoin dropped five thousand dollars in three hours with zero headline trigger, pure leverage evaporation. By the first of December, China issued another ritual crackdown, South Africa published a risk alert, and exchanges liquidated $1.1 billion in longs in a single day, the largest single-day wipeout since March 2020.
Result: Bitcoin down twenty percent in thirty days, Ethereum down twenty-two percent, total market cap down twenty-five percent. December, historically Bitcoin’s third-strongest month with an average gain of 9.7 percent, opened with a five percent red candle the size of a small continent.
The Five Real Killers
It wasn’t one villain. It was a firing squad.
First, leverage had become comical. Open interest in perpetual futures hit fifty-four billion dollars, an all-time record.
Second, global liquidity dried up fast. The Fed kept quantitative tightening alive, real yields rose, the dollar ripped higher, and Japanese government bond yields spiked for the first time in decades. Risk assets got crushed; crypto, the most levered risk asset of all, got crushed hardest.
Third, regulators flexed. China banned something (again), U.S. lawmakers argued over wording instead of passing bills, and the global mood turned hostile overnight.
Fourth, institutions quietly took profits. Bitcoin spot ETFs recorded their first sustained outflows since launch. BlackRock didn’t panic-sell, but they certainly stopped buying dips for a few weeks.
Fifth, retail did what retail always does: bought the absolute top with maximum greed and minimum margin of safety.
Perspective: This Isn’t Even That Bad (Yet)
Every post-halving bull market has suffered at least one stomach-churning correction. In 2013 the market dropped seventy-three percent mid-rally and then rose eight thousand percent. In 2017 it fell forty percent in September before rocketing to twenty thousand dollars. In 2021 it cratered fifty-three percent in May and then doubled again to sixty-nine thousand.
From $108,000, we are down roughly twenty-five percent. Historically speaking, that’s barely a speed bump.
Are We Going to Make It?
Probably, but expect turbulence before takeoff.
The bullish case remains surprisingly intact. The incoming Trump administration is openly drafting a U.S. Bitcoin strategic reserve and pushing for clearer regulations. Markets are pricing in an eighty-seven percent chance of a Federal Reserve rate cut this month and expect quantitative tightening to taper in the first half of 2026. Stablecoin supply just hit $193 billion and is still growing forty-eight percent year-to-date. On-chain transaction volume is higher than the 2021 peak. Spot ETF applications for Solana, XRP, and others are queued up; one or two approvals could unlock fifty to one hundred billion dollars of fresh institutional capital. Tokenized real-world assets, decentralized physical infrastructure, and AI-agent ecosystems are all generating actual revenue for the first time.
The bearish path is simpler: liquidity stays tight for six more months, Bitcoin grinds down to the $70,000–$74,000 zone to finish the cleansing, and altcoins rot in silence until 2027. Unpleasant, but still not a new bear market.
The apocalyptic scenario (global recession, regulatory sledgehammer, or black-swan event) feels remote, priced under five percent even on prediction markets.
Where Price Might Go Next
In the base case that history rhymes with, Bitcoin trades between $120,000 and $150,000 sometime in 2026, with a realistic stretch target above $200,000 if everything clicks. Ethereum should reclaim $5,000 to $7,000 on layer-2 scaling and staking yields. Total market capitalization could reach five to six trillion dollars by the end of the cycle, possibly stretching toward eight to ten trillion in the most euphoric outcome.
What to Own Coming Out of the Wreckage
If you believe the cycle still has legs (and the evidence strongly suggests it does), the playbook is straightforward and boring:
- Sixty to eighty percent in Bitcoin and Ethereum, the only two assets that have survived every previous winter.
- Ten to twenty percent in battle-tested layer-1 and layer-2 networks that actually generate fees.
- The rest in high-conviction narratives with real traction: real-world assets, oracles, decentralized infrastructure, AI agents.
- Keep some cash or stablecoins on the side so you can shop when the next panic hits.
Final Thought
2025 didn’t kill crypto. It simply dragged the market behind the barn, administered a brutal but necessary beating, and told it to stop borrowing money from Binance to gamble on dog coins.
The adoption curves, policy tailwinds, and on-chain growth metrics are all healthier than they have ever been. The price just needed to detox.
Every legend in this space has stared at a ninety percent drawdown and questioned every life choice that led them there. The ones who made generational wealth are the ones who zoomed out, held (or bought more), and waited for morning.
Morning always comes.
See you at one hundred fifty thousand. Bring coffee.
