Bitcoin briefly surrendered its 2025 gain as Sunday selling deepened

Bitcoin briefly gave up its remaining 2025 advance on November 16, 2025 as a weekend selloff carried the largest cryptocurrency below a venue-specific year-end benchmark. The move mattered because it reduced a rally that had exceeded 30% during 2025 to essentially zero at the session’s weakest point, testing whether institutional demand could absorb continued selling after bitcoin’s October record.

Coinbase Exchange’s BTC-USD daily candle for the UTC day beginning November 16 recorded a low of $92,943.83. The same venue’s December 31, 2024 candle closed at $93,354.22. On that consistent instrument and UTC-day basis, the November 16 low was $410.39, or approximately 0.44%, below the 2024 year-end close.

That was an intraday comparison, not the final result of the session. Coinbase recorded a November 16 open of $95,544.94 and close of $94,183.97, an open-to-close decline of approximately 1.42%. The close remained about 0.89% above Coinbase’s December 31 benchmark.

Different records captured the same threshold test

Bloomberg reported at 9:12 p.m. UTC that bitcoin had fallen below $93,714, which the outlet identified as its end-of-2024 closing level. Its event-day report said the decline had erased the year’s gain under that market-data convention. Bloomberg also placed bitcoin’s record at $126,251 on October 6, making the November 16 reversal a decline of more than one-quarter from the cited peak.

Reuters independently recorded bitcoin at $93,684 at 4:21 p.m. Eastern time, or 9:21 p.m. UTC, down 1.59% at that observation. Reuters did not identify a trading venue in the brief report, so its price cannot be treated as a Coinbase close or combined with Coinbase volume.

The differing thresholds are not necessarily contradictions. Bitcoin trades continuously across multiple exchanges, and there is no consolidated closing auction. A claim that bitcoin had “erased” its annual gain therefore depended on the venue, benchmark, timestamp and definition of the year-end reference. What the records consistently established was that the market had reached that boundary on November 16.

ETF withdrawals framed the institutional backdrop

The Sunday decline followed a difficult week for U.S. spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds. Farside Investors’ daily estimates showed combined net outflows of $1.1117 billion from November 10 through November 14. The November 14 estimate alone was a $492.1 million net outflow, including $463.1 million from BlackRock’s IBIT.

Those figures measured estimated net flows for listed funds during U.S. trading days; they were not a consolidated measure of global bitcoin demand and did not capture Sunday trading. They nevertheless showed that one prominent institutional channel had been removing, rather than adding, capital immediately before the November 16 threshold test.

The evidence does not establish that ETF redemptions alone caused the weekend decline. Derivatives positioning, broader risk appetite, liquidity and sales by existing holders could also affect price, and the reviewed records do not isolate their contributions.

A milestone with an important limitation

The defensible event-day conclusion is narrower than declaring a completed annual loss. Bitcoin traded below a consistent Coinbase year-end baseline and below Bloomberg’s separate reference during November 16, but Coinbase’s UTC candle recovered above its baseline before closing.

That distinction preserves the significance of the selloff without inventing a universal close. November 16 marked the point at which bitcoin’s substantial 2025 advance had been temporarily exhausted on major market records. It did not establish how the asset would finish November or the calendar year, and no subsequent price action is required to understand the event.