Institutional tax-loss harvesting weighs on the Bitcoin price as 2021 comes to a close

BTC price retests the recent lows at $46,000 as institutions appear to be “selling for tax reasons” while $52,000 remains a major hurdle in the path higher.

2021 has been a breakout year for the cryptocurrency market as a whole despite the year-end struggles that have kept the price of Bitcoin (

No need to panic

Reassuring words for those traders who are worried about BTC’s most recent dip below $46,000 were expressed by the crypto trader and pseudonymous Twitter user Devchart. He posted the following chart showing that Bitcoin has been trading in a clearly defined range for most of December:

Devchart explained:

“Zoom out and you will see that we are just back to the bottom of the same range we have been oscillating on since December 3rd. No need to panic until we exit this range.”

A similar outlook was offered by markets analyst and Cointelegraph contributor Michaël van de Poppe, who posted the following tweet indicating that there could be some short-term weakness in the market before ultimately heading higher.

Pretty boring markets lately. Just a process of bottoming out for #Bitcoin.

We’re retesting $46K as support, bounced, but we might need to take the liquidity beneath the lows before we’re going to make some upwards runs again.

— Michaël van de Poppe (@CryptoMichNL) December 30, 2021

The overall cryptocurrency market cap now stands at $2.237 trillion and Bitcoin’s dominance rate is 40.4%.

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