You might think the crypto bear market just showed up in February, but looking at the charts tells a different story, one filled with some pretty stark numbers.

Actually, if you really dig in, you’ll see that altcoins started their slide way back on December 8.

And this week, the signs of a bear market are hard to ignore. The crypto weather vane, CoinMarketCap’s Fear and Greed index, has swung all the way to a bearish 26. Other gauges, like the overall crypto market sentiment and the “Altcoin Season” index, are echoing this downbeat mood, registering similarly low scores of 27 and 24, respectively.

Adding to the gloom, Tuesday was a day to forget for spot bitcoin (BTC) ETFs, as they experienced their worst single day of investor withdrawals ever.

But let’s rewind to January. Back then, hardly anyone was bracing for a downturn like this. In fact, the total value of all crypto assets was still riding high, within just 3% of its all-time peak, even around the time of Donald Trump’s inauguration on January 20, 2025.

However, if you looked closer at this apparent strength, you’d realize Bitcoin was the main engine keeping things afloat, hitting its own all-time high around $108,800 that very day.

Meanwhile, all other cryptocurrencies, in contrast, had already been feeling the bear’s bite for six weeks by the time Trump was inaugurated. The total market value of altcoins had actually peaked at $1.9 trillion on December 8, 2024, and it hasn’t seen those heights again since.

Fast forward to early Wednesday, and the value of altcoins had plunged by over a third, shrinking to less than $1.2 trillion.

Three months of decline in altcoins

This recent bear market isn’t just a February thing; its roots go deeper than that. It’s been unfolding for almost a whole financial quarter now.

Even though Bitcoin’s strong performance briefly masked the market’s overall slump back in early December, it became clear that by Trump’s inauguration day, investors had fully baked their optimistic expectations into BTC.

With not many positive surprises on the horizon and a wave of bad news hitting – think the massive exchange hack and a major drop in the stock price of Michael Saylor’s company – this nearly three-month bear market serves as a stark reminder of just how up and down the crypto world can be.