Bitcoin slid under $85,000 overnight, triggering close to $600 million in long liquidations across the crypto market as traders positioned for a potential interest rate hike by the Bank of Japan this week. The move erased more than $218 million in Bitcoin longs and over $213 million in Ethereum longs while major altcoins, including Solana, XRP, BNB, Cardano, and Dogecoin, also posted notable 24-hour losses.

On Dec. 9, Bitcoin traded at $92,831.76, up 3% on the day, while total crypto market capitalization grew by $150 billion, a 2.2% increase. The session saw an intraday high near $94,600 and adoption news, including PNC launching spot BTC trading via Coinbase's Crypto-as-a-Service. Derivatives activity also intensified, with $304.3 million in short liquidations out of $418 million in total liquidations over 24 hours, according to CoinGlass.

On Dec. 7 at 05:29 UTC, a token named "year of yellow fruit" was deployed on-chain, and less than a minute later the official Binance Futures social media account promoted it, driving a 4,600% price surge and pushing its market capitalization to nearly $4 million within two hours, according to Binance. An internal audit later found that a Binance employee had used the corporate brand account for personal promotion, leading to the staffer’s suspension, a referral to legal authorities, and a $100,000 whistleblower bounty split among five reporters, while the token gained another 782% in one hour after a public announcement on Dec. 8. The incident is being discussed alongside suspicious TNSR price action around Coinbase’s Nov. 21 Vector acquisition news, underscoring wider concerns over information leakage and the abuse of exchange infrastructure.

Bitcoin recovered from $86,286 on December 2 to $93,324, gaining 8%, while American Bitcoin (ABTC) shares dropped as much as 50% intraday. The divergence reflects different catalysts: Bitcoin benefited from improved macroeconomic conditions and Vanguard's expanded crypto ETF access. ABTC suffered from a lock-up expiry that flooded the market with previously restricted shares.

Anthropic's Frontier Red Team demonstrated that AI agents autonomously reconstructed 19 real smart contract exploits from 34 incidents occurring after March 2025, extracting $4.6 million in simulated value. GPT-5 scanned 2,849 BNB Chain contracts at $1.22 per target, uncovering two zero-day vulnerabilities worth approximately $3,694 in simulated profit, according to research published December 1.

Bitcoin climbed 11% from $83,822.76 on December 1 to surpass $93,000 as the Federal Reserve formally concluded quantitative tightening and injected approximately $38.5 billion in liquidity through repo operations. The rally gained momentum after Vanguard opened its platform to crypto ETFs for the first time, while weak manufacturing data pushed rate-cut expectations above 85%. The price movement reflected multiple converging factors including the Fed's policy shift, Vanguard's distribution milestone, and short-covering from oversold levels.

Solana-based memecoin trading declined to $13.9 billion in November 2024, the lowest monthly total since February 2024. Prediction platforms Polymarket and Kalshi combined for nearly $8 billion in volume during the same period, representing 57% of Solana's memecoin activity. The ratio marks a sharp increase from below 10% in August.

Ethereum's Fusaka upgrade activates Dec. 3 at 21:49 UTC, implementing PeerDAS data-availability sampling and raising the default block gas limit to 60 million. The fork prepares infrastructure for blob-capacity expansions through parameter adjustments scheduled for Dec. 9 and Jan. 7. The upgrade targets higher rollup throughput and tighter blob fee markets without altering consensus-layer staking structures.

Bitcoin price movements now depend on ETF flows, perpetual swap funding, stablecoin liquidity, holder behavior, and macro conditions rather than traditional on-chain signals alone. Since US spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in January 2024, institutional capital flows and derivatives positioning have become primary drivers of BTC volatility.