The market on December 7 was honestly pretty tough.

Bitcoin kept sliding down, first breaking below $89,000, and soon after dropping under $88,000. If you calculate from the all-time high a few days prior to now, it's already retraced nearly 30%. In the 24 hours before the close, it dropped just over 2%. That doesn't sound like much, but the slow grind makes it feel even worse.

What’s even more crucial—nobody was trading.

Trading volume was slashed in half. Trading amounts for major coins like BTC and ETH were down more than 50%, and the market was really quiet. This kind of low-volume, slow decline is the most painful—when the price rises, things are lively; when it drops, you can’t even find a counterparty.

Those with high leverage had it even worse. Nearly 100,000 people were liquidated across the entire network in the past day, with over $110 million wiped out. A slight market fluctuation turns leverage into a meat grinder.

Everyone was waiting for one thing: the Federal Reserve’s interest rate meeting on December 9-10.

At the time, the market was pricing in an 87% chance of a rate cut in December, basically treating it as a done deal. But the problem was, even within the Fed itself there was infighting—while some officials were signaling dovishness, there were huge disagreements on whether to cut, how to cut, and so on.

At times like this, the market enters a “pre-news vacuum.” No one dares to go big in any direction, whether institutions or retail, everyone chooses to scale back and wait for the Fed's decision. JPMorgan was still calling for a bull market back then, but it didn’t matter; volumes shrank and prices kept falling anyway.

To put it simply, December 7 was a day for watching and waiting. Prices were bottoming out, sentiment was gloomy, trading was shrinking—everything was just waiting for the Fed’s answer.