Bitcoin rebounded toward $100,000 after post-Fed selloff

Bitcoin rebounded to approximately $99,500 on Bitstamp on December 21, 2024, recovering sharply after a post-Federal Reserve selloff had carried the asset near $92,000 on December 20.

The roughly $7,000 recovery in less than 24 hours mattered because it interrupted a rapid reversal from bitcoin’s record above $108,000 on December 17. It also unfolded on a Saturday, when bitcoin continued trading globally but U.S. securities markets—and the spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds that had become an important source of institutional demand—were closed.

The rebound did not restore the record or establish that the correction had ended. It showed that substantial cryptocurrency-market buying remained below $100,000 after macroeconomic expectations and leveraged positioning changed abruptly.

A violent reversal from the record

Contemporaneous TradingView data cited by Cointelegraph placed the December 21 Bitstamp high near $99,500. The same report described bitcoin gaining approximately $7,000 in under 24 hours after revisiting December lows near $92,000.

Those are venue-specific observations, not a consolidated global bitcoin price. Bitcoin trades continuously across exchanges, and daily opens, closes and percentage changes differ according to venue and cutoff. The approximately 8% trough-to-peak move implied by the rounded $92,000 and $99,500 observations is therefore an indicative calculation, not a precise market-wide return.

Forbes, using Coinbase data displayed through TradingView, separately recorded the week’s chronology: bitcoin exceeded $107,000 on December 16 and $108,000 on December 17 before falling near $92,000 on December 20. That independent venue record supports the scale and direction of the reversal while also illustrating why exchange-specific prices should not be treated as universal benchmarks.

Monetary policy changed the backdrop

The selloff followed the Federal Open Market Committee’s December 18 decision to reduce its target range by 0.25 percentage point, to 4.25%–4.50%. A rate cut would ordinarily be associated with easier financial conditions, but the accompanying policy outlook led markets to expect fewer reductions during 2025 than previously anticipated.

The Federal Reserve statement did not discuss bitcoin or attribute any digital-asset movement to monetary policy. Contemporaneous analysts nevertheless connected the retreat in speculative assets to the revised rate outlook, a stronger dollar and the unwinding of leveraged long positions. That explanation is plausible context, not proof that one announcement caused every trade.

ETF outflows continued before the weekend

The rebound also followed two negative sessions for U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs. Compiled issuer-level data show approximately $671.9 million of net outflows on December 19 and another $277.0 million on December 20. The two-session sum was about $948.9 million.

BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust accounted for $72.7 million of the December 20 outflow, its largest negative daily figure reported up to that date. The December 19 aggregate was then the largest single-session net outflow for the U.S. spot bitcoin products since their January launches.

ETF net flows measure estimated creations and redemptions during U.S. trading sessions. They are not ETF share-trading volume, do not reveal the identities or motives of investors and cannot show exactly when authorized participants bought or sold bitcoin. No ETF flow occurred on December 21 because it was a Saturday.

What December 21 established

The narrow conclusion is that bitcoin recovered most of the December 20 intraday decline and again approached $100,000 despite a changed interest-rate outlook and almost $949 million of estimated two-session ETF outflows.

The evidence did not establish a durable bottom, a return to the December 17 record or a causal relationship between ETF redemptions and the weekend rebound. The next verifiable tests were the reopening of U.S. markets, subsequent ETF creation data and bitcoin’s behavior across independently administered benchmarks.