Bitcoin Crashes Under $90K as Death Cross Creates 'Extreme Fear' Sentiment

Bitcoin plunged below $90,000 Tuesday Hong Kong time on Coinbase, extending a selloff that has now erased the entirety of its 2025 gains and pushed sentiment into one of its most depressed readings of the cycle.

The drop to $89,420, its lowest level since February, comes just six weeks after prices topped out at a record $126,250, marking a sharp reversal.

The slide accelerated after Bitcoin failed to reclaim key support at $93,700 over the weekend, breaking below its 200-day moving average and triggering a “death cross” between the 50-day and 200-day trendlines.

That signal, while imperfect, tends to coincide with multi-week drawdowns when accompanied by evaporating liquidity and stalled ETF inflows — both of which are now visible.

Flows into the U.S. spot ETFs, which absorbed more than $25 billion earlier in the year, have flatlined for nearly two weeks amid concerns that the Trump administration’s tariff agenda could inject another round of inflation and delay Federal Reserve rate cuts.

Corporate balance-sheet buyers that aggressively accumulated in the first half of the year have likewise paused purchases.

Retail stress is deepening. The crypto Fear & Greed Index fell to 11 on Monday, its lowest print since the 2022 bear market, signaling “extreme fear.”

Social dominance for Bitcoin, the share of marketwide chatter tied to BTC, has spiked, a pattern that historically appears near local capitulation events as traders abandon altcoins to focus on the benchmark asset.

Analysts warn that failure to reclaim $93,000 in the near term leaves a clear liquidity pocket toward $86,000–$88,000.

Still, some note that sentiment shocks of this magnitude often precede short-term relief rallies if ETF outflows stabilize and macro data turns less hawkish in the coming weeks.

Just noise

Some of the buying pressure that traditionally helped push bitcoin's price higher may now be flowing into stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets, according to Dan Tapiero, an investor and founder of growth-equity fund 50T Holdings.

Still, he remains confident in the asset's long-term prospects, supported by strong fundamentals and growing institutional interest. For him, the short-term uncertainty is just noise, he said.