Milestones

Two patterns are visible once the entries are laid out in order. The first is that protocol events and market events have run on different clocks. The halvings arrived on schedule every four years regardless of what the price was doing, while the market events clustered around them without any fixed relationship. The halving record shows the supply side of that; the cycle analysis takes up the question of whether the two clocks are connected.

The second is that adoption events have become less frequent and more consequential. The early years produced a steady stream of firsts — the first transaction, the first exchange, the first purchase of a physical good — each of which mattered enormously at the time and none of which changed the network's capabilities. The later entries are fewer and larger: a sovereign adopting the asset as legal tender, a regulated spot market opening in the United States. The timeline is thinning out, and the entries that remain are heavier.

The most recent chapter is the 2025 cycle. Bitcoin began the year under pressure and fell to a low of $80,600 on 21 November 2025, then recovered to set its record high of $126,198 on 6 October 2025 before the fourth-quarter correction took hold and the year closed at $87,508.83 on 31 December 2025. The sequence is worth reading against the earlier entries rather than in isolation: the peak arrived roughly eighteen months after the April 2024 halving, in keeping with the lag the completed cycles showed, and the correction that followed was shallower than the declines of 2018 and 2022. Those figures are drawn from the same curated record as the yearly returns and the historical data tables, and they carry the same vintage.

For the price record behind these events, the daily price history and the yearly returns are the two series to read alongside this page. The data sources and methodology page records where each series comes from and how it is prepared.