Crypto hasn’t stopped dumping since Donald Trump’s inauguration

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—by Protos Staff

Many people might have assumed that the crypto bear market is something that started in February. However, a review of the charts reveals a longer history of sobering statistics.

In fact, altcoins have been on the decline since December 8.

Evidence of a bear market is everywhere this week. CoinMarketCap’s Fear and Greed index is at a decisively bearish 26, while other indices, such as crypto market sentiment and “Altcoin Season” sit at similarly dismal 27 and 24 levels, respectively.

Not only that, on Tuesday, spot bitcoin (BTC) ETFs experienced their worst single day of outflows in history.

Rewind to January, however, and barely anyone predicted such a downturn. Indeed, the market capitalization of crypto assets in general remained within 3% of its all-time high during Donald Trump’s January 20, 2025 inauguration.

However, a closer look at this apparent resilience reveals that BTC did most of the heavy lifting, marking its all-time high near $108,800 on that particular day.

All other crypto assets, in contrast, had already been in a bear market for six weeks by the day Trump took office. Indeed, the market cap of altcoins peaked at $1.9 trillion on December 8, 2024, and has never regained that level.

By early Wednesday morning, altcoins had declined more than one-third and were worth less than $1.2 trillion.

Three months of decline in altcoins

The roots of this latest bear market stretch much further than February 2025. In fact, it is nearly a fiscal quarter in duration.

By Wednesday, altcoins had declined more than one-third to less than $1.2 trillion.

Read more: Strategy trades at nine-month low multiple to its bitcoin holdings

Although bitcoin’s outperformance temporarily hid the market’s downturn in early December, the day of Trump’s inauguration was clearly the day when investors had fully priced in their bullish expectations via BTC.

With few additional catalysts on the horizon and an avalanche of negative news such as the world’s largest exchange hack and a halving of the share price of Michael Saylor’s company, the nearly three-month bear market is a mathematical reminder of crypto’s cyclical volatility.

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