Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index Plunges to ’Fear’ Territory as Price Crashes to $112,000

Bitcoin's sentiment indicator flashes red as market psychology shifts dramatically.

The Fear & Greed Index—that emotional barometer traders watch like hawks—has officially entered 'fear' mode. Not just a slight dip, but a full-scale retreat from optimism.

Price action tells the story: Bitcoin sliced through support levels to hit $112,000. That's not a correction—it's a statement.

Market psychology unraveling

When fear takes over, rationality often exits stage left. The same investors who were chanting 'to the moon' at $150,000 are now questioning their life choices. Classic herd behavior—just with digital assets instead of cattle.

Traders are dumping positions, leverage is unwinding, and the usual 'buy the dip' crowd has gone suspiciously quiet. Even the perpetual optimists are checking their portfolios twice.

Technical breakdown or fundamental shift?

The charts show clear breakdowns at key levels, but the real question is whether this is temporary volatility or something deeper. Institutional money—usually the steady hand—appears to be sitting this dance out.

Meanwhile, traditional finance types are probably sipping champagne and muttering 'I told you so' about cryptocurrency volatility. Because apparently stable markets that crash every decade are superior.

What happens when fear becomes the dominant sentiment? History suggests either capitulation or the mother of all buying opportunities. Your move, investors.

Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index Suggests Investors Now Fearful

The “Fear & Greed Index” refers to an indicator created by Alternative that tells us about the average sentiment present among traders in the Bitcoin and wider cryptocurrency markets.

The index uses the data of the following five factors to determine the investor mentality: volatility, trading volume, market cap dominance, social media sentiment, and Google Trends.

It then represents the calculated sentiment as a score lying between zero and hundred. All values above 53 correspond to a net sentiment of greed, while those under 47 imply the presence of fear in the market. A value between these two thresholds naturally corresponds to a neutral mentality.

Now, here is how the sentiment among bitcoin traders is currently like, according to the Fear & Greed Index:

As is visible above, the index has a value of 45 at the moment, indicating that the investors are fearful, although only to a slight degree. The fear value is a new shift for the market, with this being the first time since September 7th that the metric has dipped into the zone.

The worsening of sentiment is a result of the bearish price action that Bitcoin and other digital assets have faced recently, with prices across the sector observing a particularly sharp drop during the last 24 hours.

The turn to fear, however, may actually not be a bad sign for the market, if the past is anything to go by. Historically, BTC and company have tended to MOVE in the direction that goes contrary to the expectations of the crowd. The probability of such an opposite move occurring generally only goes up the more sure the traders become of a direction.

On the Fear & Greed Index, there are two regions where this likelihood becomes the strongest: extreme fear (below 25) and extreme greed (above 75). The former is where major bottoms have occurred in the past, while the latter has facilitated top formations.

While the investor sentiment is currently far from turning into extreme fear, the fact that investors are no longer greedy could still be a positive for the bull run’s hopes. It only remains to be seen, though, how things WOULD play out for Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

In some other news, the latest market crash induced a large amount of liquidations in the derivatives market, but speculators haven’t become discouraged by the squeeze, as CryptoQuant community analyst Maartunn has explained in an X post.

As displayed in the above chart, the Open Interest plummeted alongside the Bitcoin price plunge, but it has already made some recovery with a jump of $1 billion (2.63%).

BTC Price

Bitcoin has come down to the $12,600 level following its latest plummet.