The decoupling of BTC from US stocks hit a new low after FTX, and deleveraging reshaped asset attributes

According to WooFunai, the correlation between Bitcoin and the US stock market has fallen to an all-time low since FTX went out of business. This phenomenon was confirmed by data provided by Santiment and attracted deep attention from CryptoBriefing. The market structure is undergoing a fundamental shift. Bitcoin is no longer blindly following the pulse of traditional financial markets, but is showing unprecedented independence.

This decoupling is not an accidental fluctuation, but a sign of the underlying logical restructuring of assets. It indicates that the cryptocurrency market is trying to break away from the fragile balance of being highly tied to technology stocks in the past and instead explore a pricing path based on its own supply and demand relationship. Investors need to re-examine Bitcoin's position in macro portfolios, as the old risk asset label can no longer accurately describe its current behavioral characteristics.

Decoupling this decoupling process from a quantitative dimension, the data showed an extremely tense divergence trend. The 30-day rolling correlation coefficient monitored by Santiment hit an extreme value of -0.299 in December 2025, and barely recovered to around 0.18 until January 2026. Looking back at 2024 and the beginning of 2025, Bitcoin showed a high degree of synchronicity with the Nasdaq 100 Index. This close linkage has led analysts to generally classify it as a typical risky asset, believing that its price is heavily constrained by macroeconomic factors affecting the stock market.

However, the latest market performance completely shatters this cognitive framework. According to data compiled by WooFunai, during the critical window period from the end of August 2025 to the beginning of 2026, the price of Bitcoin fell sharply by about 43%, while the S&P 500 index bucked the trend and rose by about 7% during the same period. A sharper contrast comes from gold, a traditional safe-haven asset that recorded a 51% increase over the same period. The huge contrast between these three sets of data clearly outlines the differentiated responses of different asset classes to the same macro environment: when traditional risk assets and safe-haven assets both strengthen, Bitcoin is under pressure alone. This directly falsifies the assumption that it is a simple risk asset and reveals the complexity of its internal driving mechanism.

The underlying reason lies in the structural deleveraging process triggered by Bitcoin spot ETFs. The introduction of Bitcoin spot ETFs in early 2024 was intended to allow traditional investors to participate in the market in a regulated manner, which is regarded as a milestone in the industry. However, while introducing significant institutional funding, this mechanism has also introduced new vulnerabilities. Despite the initial surge in capital inflows, the ensuing risk of large-scale redemptions, which are extremely sensitive to market sentiment. The report points out that the core driving force behind the current decline in Bitcoin prices is not macroeconomic deterioration, but rather investors' actions to reduce loan funds or close positions — the so-called deleveraging process. Even during the period from the end of August 2025 to the beginning of 2026, when stock market performance was strong, this internal liquidation pressure still dominated the price trend.

Notably, this deleveraging is fundamentally different from the panic sell-off during FTX's collapse: the latter is a systemic risk reassessment due to credit collapse, while the former is a result of ETF capital flows combined with broader cryptocurrency market restructuring. In the process of adapting to this new environment, investors must face sharp short-term fluctuations caused by the liquidation of loan funds. This is an unavoidable pain in the process of shifting the market from being dominated by retail investors to being dominated by institutions.

This growing decoupling phenomenon heralds a profound restructuring of Bitcoin's asset attributes. It's no longer just a proxy variable for risk appetite; in certain circumstances, it may act more like gold as a store of value, or follow a unique cycle determined by the cryptocurrency's own factors. For investors seeking diversified returns, the declining correlation coefficient means that Bitcoin can bring independent alpha returns to portfolios, even though its high volatility is still a risk exposure that cannot be ignored. The ongoing deleveraging process shows that the market is still digesting the new ecosystem after the ETF was launched, and it will take time for prices to stabilize. In the future, Bitcoin's trend will depend more on ETF capital flows, regulatory developments, and specific market sentiment in the cryptocurrency sector, rather than simply the rise and fall of US stocks. While this decoupling may reduce its appeal as a pure risk asset, it has created room for more refined investment strategies. As the market continues to develop, investors should pay close attention to these correlation coefficients, as they can provide key clues to understanding Bitcoin's place in the overall financial landscape, indicating that the market is maturing and becoming increasingly constrained by its own fundamentals.