Bitcoin Fails $90K Breakout as Market Retraces and Altcoins Suffer: Market Watch

The past 24 hours saw the broader cryptocurrency market continue its choppy price action, with the majority trading in the red.

This follows multiple unsuccessful attempts on behalf of Bitcoin, as well as most other leading altcoins, to reclaim pivotal technical levels going into the last few days of 2025.

$90K is a Tough Cookie for Bitcoin

As we reported yesterday, Bitcoin was trying to breach $90,000 on what seemed like the first sign of sustainable gains in the past few days. Those attempts were for not, unfortunately.

At the time of this writing, BTC has retraced by roughly 2.5% in the past 24 hours, currently trading around $87,5000.

The total liquidations for the same period stand at around $250 million, marking an increase of 27% compared to the previous day. Naturally, almost $200 million of those were long traders, according to data from Coinglass.

The crash came following the push above $90,000, as the price reached as high as $90,536 (on Bitstamp).

At this rate, Bitcoin is set to close the fourth quarter of 2025, charting a loss of around 22%. This would mark its weakest Q4 performance since the bear market in 2018. On-chain signals, macro pressure, as well as a notably fading speculative activity, all point to a fragile phase, at least in the short term.

Altcoins Feel the Heat Too

Most of the leading altcoins are trading well in the red. Ethereum also failed to sustain its price above $3,000 and is currently located at around $2,950, charting a loss similar to that of BTC.

SOL, TRX, DOGE, ADA, XRP, BNB, and many others are down between 1.5% and 2%, while Zcash (ZEC) and Monero (XMR), both privacy-oriented coins, are down a more sustainable 6% on the day. Hyperliquid’s HYPE is also down by 4.4%.

Today’s biggest gainer is Provenance Blockchain’s HASH token, which is up 8.4% in the past 24 hours, followed by Rain (up 6.5%).

On the other hand, Midnight (NIGHT) lost the most, as the token plunged by a whopping 21%. Next in line is PUMP – the native cryptocurrency of the popular token issuance platform on Solana – Pump.fun. It’s down 13% over the same period.

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