Can Bitcoin dip to $45,000 by December 31, 2026?

• Polymarket prices NO shares at 92% while Yes trades at 8%.
• This market has recorded $6.8M in trading volume, with $27.7K traded in the past 24 hours.
• Liquidity currently stands at $528.4K, representing the available capital across the market.
• The market will resolve on January 1, 2027

Overview

Will Bitcoin print $45,000 or lower before 11:59 PM ET on December 31, 2026 is being priced at 22% by Polymarket traders.  

Polymarket settles that on Binance BTC/USDT one-minute candles dating back to November 24, 2025, with resolution on January 1, 2027, and Yes currently trades at 22% against No at 78% on $4.6M of volume, $214.0K of it in the past day, with $185.1K of liquidity behind the book. 

Neighbouring strikes price $50,000 at 35% and $40,000 at 16%, so $45,000 marks where this board stops treating a selloff as routine.

A 29% fall is not a tail event here

Bitcoin changed hands at $63,490 on Wednesday, down 2.3% over seven days, according to the live Bitcoin price page. Reaching $45,000 takes another 29% off that.

Which sounds dramatic until you check the record. Bitcoin already sits 50% below the $126,080 peak it set on October 6, 2025, and its 90-day low of $57,779 covers a third of the remaining distance. Traders paying 22 cents are not betting on catastrophe. They are betting on one more ordinary quarter of the same slide.

The ETF bid has stopped showing up

US spot Bitcoin ETFs shed $389.7M in the week to August 14, their largest weekly outflow in six weeks, with Fidelity’s FBTC alone surrendering $153M, and net redemptions across the first half of 2026 reached $3.3 billion. Citi cut its 12-month forecast to $82,000 from $112,000 in July and marked expected annual ETF inflows down to zero.

Supply keeps arriving anyway. Miners moved 1,648 BTC in ten days, and Bhutan offloaded 175 BTC from its government wallets this week.

Wednesday’s minutes are the near-term test

Fed chair Kevin Warsh held rates at 3.50%-3.75% on July 29, with three FOMC members dissenting in favour of a hike, and the minutes of that meeting publish at 2:00 PM ET on Wednesday. Futures now assign a 61% chance to a 25 basis point increase on September 16, with Brent at $91.3 after the US-Iran ceasefire expired on August 17 and headline CPI running at 3.4%.

A hike into an oil shock is the cleanest available path to $45,000. The 2026 Fed rate hike market is a coin flip at 51%, which is a lot of unpriced risk sitting under a contract quoted at 22.

What is holding the line

Corporate treasuries have not stepped back. Metaplanet committed 2,100 BTC to a new US vehicle this week, Citi confirmed crypto custody plans for later this year, and the SEC published its proposed Reg Crypto framework on Tuesday.

None of that is a floor. It explains why the same Polymarket board gives Bitcoin only a 31% shot at $80,000 by December while pricing $45,000 at 22. Both tails look thin. The market is paying for four more months of drift.