Bitcoin slump lifts Polymarket downside odds

Bitcoin stabilized early Monday after the Sunday drop, trading around $66,410 in the latest session, with an intraday range of roughly $64,388 to $68,213. Polymarket’s “below $55,000” contract drew the largest bearish attention in the update, with the probability rising to 72%. Separate downside brackets also traded actively, with “below $50,000” priced at 61% and “below $45,000” at 47%, alongside reported volumes tied to those markets.

The repricing in prediction markets came as Bitcoin’s market capitalization slid to about $1.31 trillion, a level that pushed it behind the Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) in a global asset ranking and left it sitting around 15th by market cap, according to 8marketcap data referenced in the report. The article pegged Bitcoin’s market-cap decline this year at roughly $440 billion, describing the move as consistent with a broader crypto drawdown: total crypto market cap was cited as down about $760 billion, or 24.5%, based on CoinGecko figures.

Pricing around $55,000 has also become a focal point in analyst commentary cited alongside the prediction-market shift. The report said Standard Chartered analysts projected Bitcoin could drop to $50,000 before potentially recovering toward $100,000, while CryptoQuant suggested $55,000 may represent an “ultimate market bottom.” The same CryptoQuant commentary referenced stress in Tether’s USDT liquidity conditions that it said resembled patterns seen near the 2022 market bottom.

On the flow side, CryptoQuant data cited in the report pointed to a sharp cooling in stablecoin exchange inflows. Net USDT inflows to exchanges were described as falling from a one-year high of $616 million in November 2025 to just $27 million in the most recent snapshot referenced, a shift framed as indicating weaker incremental buying power during the selloff.

The Polymarket pricing adds a real-time lens on positioning as spot trades attempt to stabilize after the weekend break below $65,000. In the update, Bitcoin was described as briefly dipping under $65,000 on Sunday before rebounding toward the mid-$65,000s to low-$66,000s range into Monday. That stabilization, however, coexisted with heavier pricing for deeper downside outcomes across multiple contracts, showing that the market for near-term protection and bearish scenarios remained active even as spot retraced off the lows.

Result is a session in which traders are simultaneously watching whether spot can hold above the mid-$60,000s while prediction-market prices concentrate attention on the next major downside band. The report connected the growing focus on $55,000 to a mix of platform-level sentiment and institutional-style takes, tying the level to both forecast-style commentary and crypto-native metrics around liquidity and flows.