There were few obvious signs of the crypto market’s malaise at a lively Christmas party hosted on Wednesday by industry cheerleader Anthony Pompliano at New York’s Freehand Hotel. Enjoying the crudités and free booze were lobbyists, investors and even an individual selling bitcoin-denominated life insurance.

“We see this as a healthy pullback in crypto and bitcoin,” Cantor Fitzgerald crypto analyst Brett Knoblauch said in a note to clients, adding that he expects bitcoin’s price to eventually rise above $1.5mn per token — 16 times its current value.

But the speed and scale of the recent sell-off, which has seen bitcoin lose a quarter of its value in two months, has sparked fresh troubles elsewhere. Speaking on Monday, Phong Lee, chief executive of Strategy, a so-called bitcoin treasury vehicle that has accumulated 650,000 bitcoins over the past five years, warned of an impending “bitcoin winter”. It was a reference to the market’s last major downturn, following the collapse in 2022 of Sam Bankman-Fried’s crypto exchange FTX.