Bitcoin slid below $94,000 as the year-end rally lost momentum

Bitcoin fell below $94,000 on December 29, 2024, extending the reversal that followed its first move above $100,000 earlier in the month. StatMuse’s aggregated BTC-USD history records an opening price of $95,174.06, a high of $95,174.88, a low of $92,881.79 and a close of $93,530.23 for the UTC calendar day.

Coinburn calculates the open-to-close loss at 1.73%, using the unrounded values in that dataset. The move was the clearest consequential crypto development tied specifically to a quiet year-end Sunday: continuous digital-asset trading continued while U.S. equity, exchange-traded-fund and regulated futures markets were closed.

A rally moved into correction

The December 29 close was 13.61% below the $108,268.45 intraday high recorded by the same dataset on December 17. That comparison describes a twelve-day drawdown from the month’s peak; it does not establish a formal bear market, predict a further decline or prove that one catalyst caused the retreat.

A contemporaneous market report published at 14:05 UTC on December 29 placed bitcoin near $94,830 and described holiday-period activity as subdued. The later full-day candle shows that selling continued after that snapshot, with the aggregate price reaching its $92,881.79 daily low before the UTC session ended.

The distinction between an intraday report and a completed daily candle matters. Crypto trades around the clock, and rolling 24-hour statistics shown during a session are not interchangeable with figures calculated after a fixed UTC day has closed.

The institutional backdrop

The retreat followed the Federal Open Market Committee’s December 18 decision to reduce the federal-funds target range by 25 basis points, to 4.25%–4.50%. The Federal Reserve’s accompanying projections showed a median 3.9% federal-funds rate for the end of 2025, compared with 3.4% in its September projections. In quarter-point increments, that revision was consistent with two reductions during 2025 instead of the four implied in September.

That policy shift was part of the market context available on December 29, but chronology alone does not demonstrate causation. Bitcoin had traded above $100,000 after the December 18 meeting and moved in both directions during the subsequent holiday period. ETF creations and redemptions also could not provide a same-session signal on Sunday, December 29 because the relevant funds were not trading.

The narrower conclusion is that enthusiasm surrounding bitcoin’s December record had weakened before year-end. The asset remained far above its levels from the beginning of 2024, but the December 29 candle showed that crossing $100,000 had not created a durable price floor.

What the market data can establish

The verified development is the price path, not an explanation for every trade. StatMuse supplies one aggregated daily history, while CoinGecko documents that its selected-date historical observations use UTC. Coinbase separately defines daily OHLCV intervals as beginning at 00:00 UTC and ending immediately before 00:00 UTC on the following date. These conventions make the measurement window explicit, but they do not create an official global closing auction.

Prices, highs, lows and volumes can differ across Coinbase, Kraken, offshore USDT markets and multi-venue aggregators because each observes a different set of trades. The $93,530.23 figure should therefore be read as the close in the cited aggregate dataset, not as a universal execution price. This reconstructed archive records what the December 29 evidence supports without assigning an unverified cause or importing later market outcomes.