Analyst: The 2026 Altcoin Season Is Unlikely to Occur, 'Blue Chip Survivors' Will Ultimately Prevail

On December 23rd, Greek.live researcher Adam posted on social media that Bitcoin (BTC) continued to drop during U.S. trading hours, with the English-speaking crypto community showing clear bearish sentiment and traders expressing disappointment over the market’s weakness. Key price levels to note: - $86,000: Key support level tested repeatedly over the past 5 weeks - $93,000 & $88,000: Critical reference points for short-term trading strategies

On December 23rd, Singapore’s DBS Bank received 2,000 ETH from market maker GSR one hour ago, per The Data Nerd monitoring—valued at approximately $5.93 million. Over the past two days, the bank has received a total of 4,400 ETH in transfers from GSR, worth roughly $13.2 million.

**December 23rd** Per GMGN monitoring, shortly after the BNB Chain official Twitter account posted a tweet featuring CZ as an “elf on the shelf” at 4 PM ET today, multiple Meme coins sharing the same name popped up quickly on the BSC chain. The earliest issued token briefly surged to a market cap of $200,000. Monitoring shows 22 related whale addresses are active, plus 314 wallets executing batch transactions via MEV bundling. However, the tweet was deleted shortly after posting—triggering the corresponding Meme coin’s market cap to plummet to $13,000. Against recent muted market conditions and thin liquidity, the market remains highly sensitive. Traders are closely watching major official announcements for narrative-driven opportunities, and the frequency of rapid speculation via bundled transactions and whale manipulation has spiked. Previously, He Yi replied on X: “You don’t need to look for angles in official Vs or editors—we won’t be paying attention to these Meme coins

On December 23, Greeks.live noted in a social media post that this week falls during the Christmas holiday—with U.S. stock markets closed on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. During this period, institutional and retail investors in Europe and the U.S. typically step back from trading, a trend that usually holds until after New Year’s Day. This Friday (the 26th) marks the annual settlement day, with over 50% of current total options open interest set to expire. Most institutions have opted to roll over positions in advance. Since last week, implied volatility (IV) across all major expiry dates has fallen sharply, alongside a rise in block trades. Combined with declining volatility, the Christmas trading lull, and year-end position rolling, Bitcoin’s IV for all key expiry dates has dropped by more than 5% over the past month—with short-to-medium-term IV down over 10%. Ethereum has seen an even steeper IV decline. Collectively, these data signal subdued market expectations: co

December 23rd — PeckShieldAlert monitoring detected that wallets 0x1209...e9C and 0xaac6...508 were hacked due to private key exposure, resulting in losses of approximately 2.3 million USDT. The attacker swapped the stolen funds for 757.6 ETH and laundered the assets through the TornadoCash mixer.

On December 23, per BitcoinTreasuries.NET, Canadian publicly traded firm Matador Technologies (ticker: MATA) has unveiled plans to raise $58 million to acquire additional Bitcoin (BTC), targeting 1,000 BTC in holdings by the end of 2026.