Bitcoin price history, 2010 to the present

Bitcoin has had a market price for only part of its existence. The network began producing blocks in January 2009, but for more than a year there was no exchange on which to buy or sell it, and no agreed way to say what one coin was worth. The earliest prices were struck privately between individuals, and the first widely cited figure — roughly four cents per coin — comes from a purchase of two pizzas in May 2010. Every number before that date is a reconstruction, and every number after it is a record of a market that was, at first, extremely thin.

The years from 2010 to 2013 were the period in which Bitcoin stopped being a curiosity and became a traded asset. A handful of exchanges opened, most of them small and lightly regulated, and the price moved violently on very little volume. The first speculative peak arrived in June 2011, when the price touched about thirty-one dollars before collapsing within weeks. That pattern — a rapid advance, a brutal retracement, then a long period of quiet accumulation — repeated often enough in the following decade that it became the defining rhythm of the asset. By the end of 2013 the price had crossed one thousand dollars for the first time, and the press had discovered it.

What followed was a lesson in how little a high price guarantees. The collapse of the Mt. Gox exchange in early 2014 removed the largest venue of the era and took a large share of customer balances with it. The price fell through 2014 and 2015, spending long stretches below three hundred dollars while the network itself kept running without interruption. For readers trying to understand the asset, this is the most instructive stretch of the record: the technology improved, the price did not, and the two were only loosely connected.

The cycle that peaked in December 2017 was different in scale but similar in shape. Bitcoin rose from under a thousand dollars at the start of the year to nearly twenty thousand by mid-December, drawing in a global wave of retail buyers. The decline that followed took the price back below four thousand dollars within a year, an eighty per cent fall that would have ended most assets. Instead the market rebuilt through 2019 and 2020, and the composition of buyers began to change. Public companies, funds and established financial firms started to appear in the record, and the daily trading volumes grew large enough that single orders no longer moved the price as they once had.

The pandemic crash of March 2020 was the sharpest single-day fall in the asset's history, and it was followed by the fastest recovery. The cycle that ran from that low to the high of November 2021 was the first in which institutional participation was a visible part of the story rather than a footnote. The high near sixty-nine thousand dollars was followed by another deep decline through 2022, and then by a recovery that carried the price to new highs in 2024 and beyond.

The fourth halving, in April 2024, reduced the block subsidy to 3.125 bitcoin and marked the point at which the market's structure changed again: a US spot exchange-traded fund was already trading, and the advance that followed carried the price to a new high above one hundred and twenty-six thousand dollars in October 2025 before a sharp fourth-quarter correction. The daily series below is a different kind of object from the narrative above it. It is a bounded recent window — roughly the last three hundred days — fetched live from the Coinbase exchange by the site's canister rather than reconstructed from historical sources, and it is stamped with the moment of its last successful fetch. The curated annual tables that follow carry a fixed vintage instead, because a year's open, high, low and close can only be stated once the year has ended. The two regimes are labelled separately throughout, so a reader can always tell which kind of number they are looking at.