Bitcoin briefly slipped below $87,000 in post-Christmas trading on Friday before rebounding toward $88,500, as a record options expiry collided with a historic rally in gold and silver that pulled capital away from crypto.(coingecko.com)
At press time, bitcoin traded around $88,500, up roughly 1% over the past 24 hours, after printing a low near $86,900 and a high just above $89,400 on major spot venues, according to price feeds from CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.(coingecko.com)
The global crypto market cap hovered near $3.05 trillion on Friday, with CoinGecko showing a modest 0.7% daily gain, while CoinCodex tracked a 0.66% drop in total market value to about $2.93 trillion even as bitcoin gained around 1.4%, a pattern that points to heavier selling in altcoins than in BTC.(coingecko.com)
Holiday liquidity and record options expiry
Derivatives desks spent the week flagging December 26 as a stress point, with options analytics sites estimating about $23.6 billion of bitcoin options expiring on Deribit today, the largest single expiry on record and more than half of the exchange’s open interest.(yellow.com)
The Economic Times outlined how market makers unwinding hedges around the expiry can weaken support and resistance levels, amplifying intraday swings, while QCP Capital and other desks projected 5%–7% moves with key bitcoin support clustering in the $80,000–$82,000 zone if selling accelerates into thin holiday liquidity.(m.economictimes.com)
ETF outflows and the debasement trade
Spot crypto ETFs added another layer of pressure. Data compiled by IndexBox from SoSoValue showed $175 million in net outflows from U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs on December 24 and $57 million from ether products, while a separate tally from HTX Insights put cumulative bitcoin ETF redemptions at roughly $825 million over the five trading days heading into Christmas. CryptoSlate earlier calculated that U.S. spot bitcoin ETFs have seen assets drop by about $48.9 billion since an October 6 peak, leaving the sector back near late-2024 asset levels despite $22.3 billion in net creations this year.(indexbox.io)
In a Friday markets note, CoinDesk framed the session as one where metals, not bitcoin, captured the “debasement trade” as BTC stumbled, while a Blockworks newsletter argued that gold and silver will likely go down as 2025’s standout assets, with gold up around 72% year to date and silver near 160%, both sitting at or near fresh all-time highs above $4,500 and $75 an ounce respectively.(coindesk.com)
Metals break away from crypto
That metals outperformance now rests on hard numbers. Reuters reported that spot silver jumped 4.5% on Friday to about $75.20 per ounce after tagging a record $75.62, while spot gold traded near $4,526.92 after hitting an all-time high at $4,533.14. Year to date, silver has gained roughly 161% and gold about 72%, marking gold’s strongest calendar year since 1979.(reuters.com)
Those moves sit on top of roaring domestic futures and retail flows. LiveMint tracked record silver prices on India’s MCX on Friday and spot silver around $74.56 globally after an earlier $75.14 intraday peak, while a separate FinancialContent analysis highlighted how central banks from China to Poland have spent the year lifting official gold reserves as part of a broader push to hedge against a fragmenting dollar system.(livemint.com)
“$77/oz and then $80 in silver is within reach by year-end.”(reuters.com)
Peter Grant, vice president and senior metals strategist at Zaner Metals, gave that target in comments to Reuters as he described thin markets driven by expectations for further Fed easing in 2026, a softer dollar and heightened geopolitical tensions, including fresh U.S. airstrikes against Islamic State militants in Nigeria.(reuters.com)
For crypto traders, the message right now is that the macro “flight to safety” has not chosen bitcoin as its primary hedge. Bitcoin still carries a market cap around $1.76 trillion and roughly 58% dominance on a roughly $3.05 trillion asset class, but it trades nearly 30% below its early October all-time high near $126,000, with concentrated options positioning and ongoing ETF redemptions amplifying late-year volatility.(coingecko.com)
Memecoins and other high beta niches feel that repricing most acutely. A Cointelegraph analysis on TradingView noted that a basket of popular memecoins trades about 65% below last year’s Christmas peak, underlining how quickly speculative appetite faded once capital started chasing steady gains in metals instead of lottery-ticket bets on-chain.(tradingview.com)
Heading into the weekend, desks will track how today’s expiry settlement and the last days of tax and portfolio positioning shape flows. A clean hold above the high-$80,000 area keeps bitcoin’s structure intact into year-end, but the stronger the safe-haven bid for metals stays, the more every rally in BTC risks running into macro sellers who now measure “hard money” performance in ounces, not sats.
