Bitcoin’s correlation with the Nasdaq and technology stocks dropped to near zero in 2025.
Spot ETF inflows and post-halving supply cuts reshaped Bitcoin’s demand.
Unique crypto market forces made Bitcoin move independently from traditional Stocks.
Bitcoin price action moved differently from big-cap technology stocks and the Nasdaq-100 in 2025. After several years when both often rose and fell together, the relationship loosened and sometimes even flipped. Rolling correlations slid toward zero and occasionally turned negative, while BTC traded around the $100,000 mark.
The break can be understood by looking at structure (spot ETF flows and supply), macro forces (liquidity, rates, and fiscal conditions), and market microstructure (derivatives and exchange inventories), along with headlines that are specific to the asset rather than to equities.
Short-term correlations between Bitcoin and major US stock indices dropped sharply in mid- to late-2025. By late October, common 30- to 90-day measures hovered near zero, a stark contrast with the pandemic era when similar windows often sat around 0.4–0.6. The change did not happen overnight, but became obvious as the second half of 2025 unfolded.
Commentaries through September, October, and early November repeatedly described a “great decoupling,” noting that Bitcoin began to move according to crypto-specific drivers rather than the fate of mega-cap tech. This shift restored a behavior that long-run studies had always hinted at. Bitcoin’s average correlation with stocks across many years was modest and unstable, not fixed and high.
US spot Bitcoin ETFs, first approved in 2024, reshaped demand during 2025. Inflows and outflows in these funds became a clean, visible gauge of institutional interest. Cumulative inflows across the ETF category grew through 2024–2025, even with some standout days of heavy outflows from the largest fund.
Those big outflow days grabbed attention but did not erase the broader trend of assets building in the wrapper. In several weeks of November 2025, spot Bitcoin ETFs showed net creations on days when growth stocks paused or slipped. That pattern reinforced the sense that ETF investors were marching to a different rhythm from Nasdaq traders.
ETF plumbing explains why. Authorized participants create or redeem ETF shares in response to primary-market demand, which translates directly into buying or selling of actual BTC. This mechanism feeds spot orders into the market regardless of where tech earnings, AI spending, or semiconductor cycles stand.
As a result, ETF-driven demand can nudge or surge Bitcoin independently of equity moves, especially around month-end rebalancing or issuer announcements about new listings and fee changes. In 2025, product news around ETFs often acted as the day’s dominant catalyst for Bitcoin, even when the broader stock market looked quiet.
April 2024’s halving cut miner issuance by half, reducing the baseline amount of new Bitcoin entering circulation. Halvings in past cycles did not instantly break any correlation, but they reliably tightened the available float in the months that followed. In 2025, that tighter float met the institutional “pipes” of spot ETFs. New capital entering through ETFs flowed straight into a thinner spot market, magnifying each dollar’s impact on price.
When supply is constrained and demand appears in concentrated bursts, the result is frequent upside or downside moves that do not match the cadence of big-tech stocks. At times in 2025, Bitcoin also behaved differently from gold, underscoring that its drivers were idiosyncratic rather than purely “risk-on” or “risk-off.”
Also Read: Bitcoin Bounces Back: Is This the Perfect Dip to Buy?
Technology stocks remain highly sensitive to real yields, earnings revisions, and the scale and timing of AI-related capital spending. Bitcoin responds to global liquidity, too, but also reacts to regulatory milestones, ETF flows, network activity, and on-chain data in ways that do not map neatly onto equity factors.
As emergency-era liquidity patterns faded, the strong co-movement seen in 2020–2022 weakened. A long-horizon study published in 2025 placed the average Bitcoin-equity correlation near ~0.2 across 2014 through April 2025, punctuated by regime shifts. That history suggests the tight lockstep of the pandemic was the exception, not the rule, and 2025 marked a reversion toward Bitcoin’s more independent behavior.
This macro normalization created space for crypto-native catalysts to matter more. Headlines about ETF creations and redemptions, exchange reserves, and miner economics repeatedly drove sharp moves on days when the Nasdaq traded sideways or even in the opposite direction. From September to November, several market notes emphasized that Bitcoin could “go its own way,” while equities focused on quarterly results and shifting odds of rate cuts.
Bitcoin’s derivatives market resets positioning faster than equities. Shifts in futures funding, option skew, and dealer hedging can create short bursts of momentum that ignore stock-index drift. In late 2025, episodes of declining futures open interest appeared alongside strong spot ETF activity. When leverage drains while spot demand persists, price can grind higher without help from equities.
Around large monthly options expiries or headline events, skew and term structure can flip quickly. Dealers hedging these flows in the underlying spot market often accelerate moves, pushing prices away from whatever stocks happen to be doing at the same time. Equity index options operate on their own calendar and catalysts, so the two ecosystems frequently diverge.
Institutional adoption in 2025 carried distinct crypto signposts: additional ETF issuers, new filings, custody integrations, and more serious allocation debates inside multi-asset portfolios. Research and commentary increasingly framed Bitcoin as a scarce digital bearer asset with unique portfolio roles rather than as a proxy for growth technology.
Those narratives, reinforced by product development and infrastructure build-out, sustained periods of lower correlation. Even when macro shocks forced assets to move together briefly, the baseline quickly returned to a looser relationship.
Also Read: Bitcoin’s Next Move: How Far Will the Price Drop Amid Market Sell-Off?
Bitcoin trades around $104,000–$107,000 at the time of writing. Short-term correlations versus the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 had faded toward zero by late October after spending much of the pandemic era in the 0.4–0.6 range on common rolling windows.
A long-run analysis through April 2025 placed the average BTC-equity correlation near 0.2. Spot Bitcoin ETFs continued to attract attention with mixed but persistent activity: sequences of positive net inflows appeared even when equity momentum cooled, while occasional large single-day outflows from the biggest fund punctuated the year without reversing the broader accumulation trend.
Sustained net creations in spot ETFs during stretches of equity softness would reinforce the decoupling story. Exchange reserves and miner selling patterns will remain critical for reading supply tightness; declining reserves or more patient miner distribution would keep price sensitivity high to even modest inflows.
New product launches or regulatory steps could pull fresh capital through the same plumbing, again without any necessary link to Nasdaq moves. Finally, rolling 30- to 90-day correlation monitors will show whether near-zero readings persist into year-end or snap back during the next broad risk episode.
The break from Nasdaq in 2025 did not come from a single headline. It grew out of powerful, crypto-native mechanics against a macro backdrop that no longer forces all risk assets to trade in lockstep.
That combination pulled Bitcoin out of tech’s orbit. Correlations can spike again during market stress, but the default setting has shifted back toward independence, with price responding first to the flows, supply, and narratives that are unique to Bitcoin.
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