Live prices are currently unavailable — the exchange feed could not be reached and no recent cached reading is held.

Bitcoin Data GuideBitcoin Reference

Returns & Performance

Bitcoin's strongest and weakest calendar years

Every completed calendar year ranked by its open-to-close change, with the prices behind each figure. The ranking is dominated by the early years, and the reason is worth understanding before the numbers are quoted.

2010-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014Change is measured from the year's first traded price to its last.

Best year

—

Loading the record

Worst year

—

Loading the record

Up versus down

0 / 0

Years finished higher versus lower

The years, ranked

The ranking uses the open-to-close change, which is the convention most commonly quoted and the one that makes the least sense for a volatile asset. A year that opened at one price and closed at another says nothing about the extremes reached in between, so the high and low columns are included beside each row. A year can rank near the top on its close and still have contained a decline of more than half from its own high, and the table lets a reader see that.

Bitcoin calendar years ranked by open-to-close change, with the open, close, high and low prices behind each figure.
RankYearOpenCloseChangeHighLow
No records are available for this dataset.

2010-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014

Open-to-close versus intra-year. The change column measures the year's first traded price against its last. The high and low columns are the extremes reached at any point during the year, and they are not used in the ranking. A reader comparing the two should note that the gap between a year's high and its low is often far larger than the gap between its open and its close, which is the difference between what the calendar records and what a holder experienced.

Why the extremes belong to the early years

The strongest years in the ranking are the earliest ones, and the reason is arithmetic rather than sentiment. A market capitalised in the low millions can multiply several times over on a small inflow of capital; a market capitalised in the hundreds of billions cannot. The same enthusiasm that produced a five-thousand per cent year in 2013 produces a much smaller percentage year at today's scale. The ranking is therefore partly a ranking of the asset's size at the time, which is worth remembering before any of these figures are quoted as though they were repeatable.

The weakest years are more evenly distributed. The largest declines occurred in 2014, 2018, 2022 and 2025, which are spread across the record rather than clustered at the beginning. That asymmetry is informative: the upside extremes have compressed as the market has grown, while the downside extremes have not compressed to the same degree. A reader looking at the two ends of the table is looking at two different processes.

The count of up and down years is the least interesting column in the table and the one most often quoted. Bitcoin finished more years higher than lower, which is a favourable ratio, but the ratio says nothing about the size of the moves. A single strong year can erase several weak ones, and a single weak year can erase several strong ones. The yearly returns page publishes the full series in chronological order, and the twelve-month extremes page shows what the same question looks like when the window is not tied to the calendar.

Related reading