Bitcoin trembles at the $100,000 mark. What’s keeping pressure on the price?

Bitcoin is not looking great right now.

Traders kicked off the year by being told that the top cryptocurrency’s price would skyrocket to $200,000 before the end of 2025, but investors now find themselves watching it tremble around $100,000.

Rather than confirming expectations that the price would surge in October, Uptober failed to materialise. Instead, traders saw the total crypto market shed some $800 billion of its value, roughly 19%.

“Bears have clearly been in control,” Jasper De Maere, OTC Trader at trading firm Wintermute, told DL News.

“The market now seems to be tipping again, chopping around the critical $100,000 level, a zone that continues to be defended firmly,” De Maere continued. “This level is not just technically important but also a major psychological threshold.”

Crypto wishlist

The plunge in market confidence comes on the back of what should’ve been a victory lap for the crypto industry after a record 2025.

Since US President Donald Trump took office in January, he’s been busy ticking off items on the industry’s wishlist.

He freed Silk Road creator Ross Ulbricht, pardoned Binance co-founder Chanpeng Zhao, signed pro-crypto executive orders, and signed a landmark stablecoin bill into law.

Yet, the price plunged. Even the Federal Reserve deciding to cut interest rates in October, which is usually bullish for Bitcoin’s price, failed to drive the price up.

And analysts are losing hope. Galaxy Digital’s analysts now say the price may only manage to drag itself to $120,000 before 2026. They previously said Bitcoin would hit $185,000 ahead of January.

There are several reasons why confidence has been zapped from the market.

The crypto industry is still reeling from the October 10 crash that saw some $20 billion in liquidations, as well as the $128 million Balancer hack on November 3.

Another part of the problem, according to James Butterfill, head of research at digital asset investment firm CoinShares, is that traders have failed to update their playbook.

“Some long-term investors appear to be acting on the four-year cycle narrative, a self-fulfilling pattern we do not subscribe to but cannot ignore” Butterfill told DL News. “Adherents to this framework are locking in profits, convinced that the cycle top is approaching.”

To him, this mindset explains why many big investors have sold their positions and driven the price down 19% since its $126,000 high at the beginning of October.

Consumer sentiment

And it’s not just crypto traders that are feeling a bit down in the dumps.

American consumers’ sentiment about their future prospects have plunged to nearly record lows. Rising inflation and unemployment coupled with Trump’s trade wars and the longest running government shutdown ever darken their mood.

Add to that, there are also fears over whether the artificial intelligence bubble will burst, which also weigh on global markets.

Even so, market watchers remain bullish for the long-term prospects of crypto.

“While the pullback is likely to rattle some investors, volatility of this scale is not unusual,” Simon Peters, crypto analyst at trading platform eToro, told DL News on Friday.

He noted that Bitcoin dropped from $109,000 to $74,500 between January and April before rallying to reach its latest all-time high price.

Arthur Hayes, the co-founder of BitMEX, said on November 5 that he expects the price to hit $1 million around 2028, provided that governments keep issuing debt to pay for themselves.

But for Bitcoin to bounce back, Sean Dawson, head of research at perpetual-trading platform Derive, said it needs no more bad news to strike decentralised finance.

“No insolvency announcements, nor hacks, would re-establish trust in the market,” he told DL News on Friday.