2025 Christmas Market YoY Down 12%: A Year in Review of Collective Failures by Industry Experts

When the bells of Christmas 2025 ring, cryptocurrency investors face a disappointing gift list. To understand this year’s market performance, we need to introduce a key concept: YoY (Year over Year), which compares data from the same period this year with that of last year to measure annual growth or decline. Based on YoY data, Bitcoin’s performance during Christmas 2025 is far below that of the same period in 2024, reflecting a true market shift from celebration to caution.

Contrasting sharply with the S&P 500 reaching new highs at year-end, Bitcoin (BTC) shows clear signs of weakness during the holiday season. As of December 25, 2025, BTC closed at around $87,800, down approximately 12% YoY compared to $99,000 on Christmas 2024. This negative YoY growth reveals an awkward reality: despite reaching a historic high of $126,198 in October, the full-year performance still fell short of expectations.

Christmas Performance from a YoY Perspective: From Festivity to Pragmatism

The 2025 crypto market exhibits an extreme “binary polarization.” In terms of YoY data, Bitcoin’s year-end price fell by 12%, and the Fear & Greed Index dropped to 27, indicating retail investors are in a state of extreme panic.

In October 2025, Bitcoin briefly surged past $120,000, sparking a short-lived market frenzy. However, the subsequent “October flash crash” and the tightening of liquidity at year-end pushed prices back to around $90,000. From a YoY perspective, this decline shattered many expectations that “the second year after halving must be a bull market”—in fact, the data proves this assumption did not hold in 2025.

Notably, spot Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs experienced hundreds of millions of dollars in outflows in a single day on December 24. This reflects investors reducing risk exposure amid low liquidity at year-end. Bitcoin’s price fluctuated within a narrow range of $85,000 to $90,000, indicating a sharp decline in market volatility.

AI Siphoning Phenomenon: A Major Shift in Capital Flows

The negative YoY growth during the Christmas season of 2025 conceals a deeper capital flow transformation. Unlike simply viewing token prices, we need to focus on the real flow of funds. Despite the sluggish token prices, assets related to mining combined with AI—such as IREN, Cipher, BitMine—surged in value at year-end, becoming the biggest winners of 2025.

This divergence reflects the market’s voting: investors prefer “hashrate assets” that generate cash flow over pure speculative “tokens.” Capital hasn’t disappeared; it has shifted from “virtual currencies” to “physical computing power”—a true picture of 2025.

When NVIDIA and AI infrastructure stocks can deliver annual returns of 50%-100%, Bitcoin’s appeal as a “high-beta tech stock” diminishes significantly. Comparing YoY growth rates, AI-related assets outperform traditional crypto assets by a wide margin. This siphoning effect will continue to influence the attractiveness of cryptocurrency investments.

Why Do YoY Data Predictions Miss the Mark?

From late 2024 to early 2025, industry leaders, Wall Street analysts, and crypto KOLs made highly optimistic predictions for Bitcoin’s price at the end of 2025. Venture capital pioneer Tim Draper, the S2F model’s representative PlanB, analyst Tom Lee, Ark Invest founder Cathie Wood, Bernstein Research, and Standard Chartered’s digital asset research head Geoff Kendrick all forecast Bitcoin exceeding $150,000 by the end of 2025.

However, Bitcoin ultimately closed at around $87,800, completely missing these annual YoY targets. Most analysts underestimated two key factors:

First, the AI capital siphoning effect exceeded expectations. Most predictive models (like S2F, gold market cap ratios) assume “Bitcoin is the only savings pool,” but failed to foresee AI’s powerful attraction for capital.

Second, macroeconomic stagflation pressures were severely underestimated. Despite industry hopes for SEC reforms, Fed rate cuts, and institutional inflows, the actual effects were much lower than anticipated.

From the YoY perspective, most forecasts assumed ETF capital inflows and halving effects would add linearly, but reality shows Wall Street is still using old maps to find new continents.

Historical Review of Christmas YoY Data

Bitcoin’s performance on Christmas day has historically been mixed. Over the past decade, in 8 out of 10 years, Bitcoin experienced gains around Christmas, with increases ranging from 0.33% to 10.86%. However, in 2025, the YoY decline of 12% broke this relatively optimistic historical pattern.

Notably, halving years (2016, 2020, 2024) often foreshadowed strong Christmas rallies. Yet, as the second year after halving, 2025’s YoY data shows the worst Q4 performance in seven years. December alone fell by 22.54%, highlighting the depth of the cooling cycle.

Unlike 2017 and 2021, where Christmas was associated with a crash, 2025’s holiday is more of a “high-level consolidation.” There was no panic selling; instead, institutions adjusted their balance sheets, shifting funds from high-volatility crypto assets to AI and US tech giants. From a YoY perspective, this shift reflects increased market maturity.

Investment Insights for 2026 from YoY Data

The subdued performance of Christmas 2025—showing a 12% annual decline based on YoY—sends a clear signal: the era of “narrative-driven” crypto is ending, and the “fundamental” era has arrived.

The first insight is the validity of diminishing returns. Bitcoin is no longer the asset that can easily multiply tenfold. It is becoming a mature “digital gold” linked to macroeconomics. The declining YoY growth rate reflects that as asset size expands, growth potential diminishes. This means lower volatility and reduced excess returns.

The second insight involves ETFs as a double-edged sword. While spot ETFs bring capital, they also lock Bitcoin’s price into Wall Street trading hours and macro logic. During Christmas, US markets are closed, and Bitcoin loses independent trading momentum—evident from the abnormal YoY performance.

The third insight is the need to find new growth points. The data from 2025 shows winners are builders, not hoarders. The surge in stocks like BitMine and IREN, which have shifted to AI computing power, proves the market craves “computing power” rather than just “hashes.”

For 2026, should investors abandon the linear “S2F model” fantasy of quick riches and instead focus on real-world applications that deeply integrate blockchain with AI and energy industries? Bitcoin remains king, but its pace has become steady—perhaps even slow.

As 2025 draws to a close, the YoY decline during Christmas reminds investors that this asset is maturing: no longer driven by hype and frenzy, but increasingly by fundamentals. Looking toward 2026, investors may find opportunities in current annual adjustments, but past Christmas market history warns us not to rely solely on festive magic. The YoY data already tells us everything—the future story will be driven by fundamentals, not narratives.