Bitcoin dropped below $65,000 on February 23, falling more than 4% in 24 hours to trade at around $64,915. The decline wiped out most of the gains made over the weekend, when BTC had briefly climbed to $68,600 on Saturday before reversing course. In less than two hours of early Monday trading, the price shed over $3,000.
The sell-off came alongside weakness in traditional financial markets. Nasdaq 100 futures fell about 0.9%, reflecting a cautious mood among investors. Meanwhile, gold rose roughly 2% and silver jumped more than 5%, as investors moved money toward safer assets. This pattern shows that overall market anxiety is still hurting riskier investments like crypto.
Bitcoin is now about 48% below its all-time high of $126,000 and sitting just under its 2021 peak near $69,000.
The price drop hit leveraged traders hard. According to CoinGlass, more than 136,000 traders were liquidated in 24 hours, with total losses reaching $458 million. About 92% of those were traders betting on prices going up, who were caught off guard by the sudden decline.
Fear in the crypto market reached an extreme level. The Crypto Fear and Greed Index fell to just 5 out of 100 on Monday, a reading that has only occurred three other times since 2018, in August 2019, June 2022, and earlier this month.
On-chain data from Glassnode shows that panic selling has slowed but not fully stopped. Investors who bought Bitcoin recently were realizing steep losses earlier in February, at a rate of $1.24 billion per day. That figure has since improved to around $480 million per day, but losses are still ongoing.
Large holders are also more active. Exchange data from CryptoQuant shows that whale deposits now make up nearly two-thirds of all Bitcoin flowing onto exchanges, the highest share since 2015.