US spot Bitcoin ETFs lost $782 million in net assets over the Christmas trading week, according to SoSoValue data cited by Cointelegraph. The bleed hit during one of the thinnest liquidity windows of the year. Bitcoin itself traded roughly flat around $87,700 on Saturday, up about 0.5% over 24 hours, based on CoinMarketCap pricing.
IBIT and FBTC drive the holiday-week bleed
SoSoValue’s ETF dashboard, relayed by multiple data wires, shows that the heaviest single-day hit landed on Friday, Dec. 26. On that session, spot Bitcoin ETFs saw $276 million in net outflows, with BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) accounting for $193 million and Fidelity’s Wise Origin Bitcoin Fund (FBTC) for $74.4 million, according to reports from ChainCatcher and PANews. Grayscale’s GBTC also posted redemptions, though on a smaller scale.
Those flows capped a six-day streak of withdrawals that started ahead of Christmas and extended through Friday. SoSoValue data, accessed via its US spot ETF page at sosovalue.com and summarized by Cointelegraph, shows cumulative outflows above $1.1 billion over that six-session run. ETF net assets dropped to about $113.5 billion by Friday, down from peaks north of $120 billion earlier in December. With Bitcoin’s market value near $1.75 trillion, SoSoValue puts ETF exposure at roughly 6.5% of BTC’s total market capitalization.
Despite the week of selling, IBIT and FBTC still sit on large year-to-date inflows. PANews, citing SoSoValue, tallies IBIT’s historical net inflow at $62.06 billion and FBTC’s at $12.10 billion as of Dec. 26. The aggregate spot ETF complex has absorbed $56.63 billion since launch, which implies that redemptions at smaller issuers and GBTC have offset part of the IBIT and FBTC haul.
Biggest weeks of 2025 still top Christmas bleed
The $782 million Christmas-week outflow does not set a record for 2025. Farside Investors data, aggregated by Blockchain.News and The Block, shows multiple heavier weeks earlier in the year. In October, US spot Bitcoin ETFs shed about $1.23 billion in one week, the second-largest withdrawal since the products launched in 2024. In August, weekly redemptions reached roughly $1.18 billion. Crypto.news reported that the first two weeks of March saw $799.39 million and $870.39 million in ETF outflows respectively, for $1.67 billion over that fortnight.
So the Christmas bleed slots below the biggest stress episodes but still lands in the upper tier of weekly withdrawals for 2025. It also comes after a brief respite. In late November, spot Bitcoin ETFs finally snapped a four-week redemption run with roughly $70 million in net inflows, according to SoSoValue data cited in another Cointelegraph report. That late-November bounce now looks like a pause inside a broader outflow phase rather than a clean trend reversal.
Glassnode sees an extended ETF outflow regime
On-chain analytics firm Glassnode has tracked the same cooling pattern from a higher vantage point. In commentary shared on X and summarized by Cointelegraph and CoinMarketCap’s research desk, Glassnode notes that the 30-day simple moving average of net flows into US spot Bitcoin and Ether ETFs turned negative in early November and has stayed below zero through December. The firm describes this as a stretch of “muted participation” and “partial disengagement” by institutional allocators, reinforcing a broader contraction in crypto liquidity. Several outlets, including Cointelegraph and CoinMarketCap Academy, have relayed those findings.
Daily flow prints line up with that picture. SoSoValue data shows multiple mid-December sessions with nine-figure net outflows from Bitcoin ETFs, including roughly $189 million on Tuesday, Dec. 23, as highlighted by market coverage on CryptoNews. Combined with Friday’s $276 million pull, that sequence pushed the negative streak to at least six straight trading days and helped drive the $782 million weekly total.
Holiday positioning, not wholesale exit
Market desks frame the move as holiday positioning rather than a full exit from the trade. Kronos Research CIO Vincent Liu told Cointelegraph that year-end Bitcoin ETF outflows often reflect portfolio housekeeping as funds lock in P&L, square basis trades and trim risk into thin liquidity. He pointed to early January as the next checkpoint for gauging whether institutional demand actually broke.
‘As desks return in early January, institutional flows typically re-engage and normalize.’
Liu also flagged expectations for Federal Reserve easing in 2026 as a medium-term tailwind for Bitcoin ETF demand, with rate markets already pricing 75 to 100 basis points of cuts, according to the same Cointelegraph interview. That macro layer matters because the biggest ETF outflow weeks of 2025 have clustered around spikes in rates volatility, risk-off swings in equities and sharp BTC pullbacks.
What the week signals into January
The structure of this latest episode stands out. US spot ETFs lost $782 million in a low-liquidity holiday week while Bitcoin barely moved on net and still trades about 30% below its October all-time high near $126,000, per CoinMarketCap. Sellers chose the ETF wrapper rather than spot exchanges for most of this de-risking. That choice shifts pressure toward authorized participants and ETF market makers instead of directly walling the order books on crypto venues.
The bigger question now sits with follow-through. Glassnode’s 30-day flow gauge already signals a months-long softening in ETF demand across both Bitcoin and Ether. Christmas week adds another heavy red bar to that chart. At the same time, cumulative inflows above $56 billion and ETF ownership near 6.5% of Bitcoin’s market value show that institutions still run substantial exposure even after several large weekly drawdowns.
If desks treat the Christmas bleed as calendar maintenance and resume allocations once full liquidity returns in January, this week may register as an uncomfortable but contained reset. If outflows extend through the first full trading weeks of 2026, the data will confirm a deeper shift in how large allocators use US spot Bitcoin ETFs in a high-rate, lower-liquidity market.
