• BTC$77,454.00+0.34%
  • ETH$2,255.35+0.51%
  • USDT$1.00+0.04%
  • BNB$702.47-0.17%
  • ICP$2.51-0.95%
Bitcoin Data GuideBitcoin Reference

History

How long each crash took to heal

Every major decline in Bitcoin's record, measured from the peak that preceded it to the peak that finally exceeded it. The interval is longer than the fall in every case, and for one episode it has not ended.

2011-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014Durations are computed from the curated drawdown records, which carry the peak date, the trough date and the date the prior peak was regained. The decline is measured from peak to trough, the recovery from trough to the regained peak, and the peak-to-peak figure is their sum. The most recent episode had not regained its prior peak at the time of compilation, so its recovery fields are null rather than estimated. Dates are calendar dates, so the day counts include the endpoints of each leg.

Episodes recorded

5

Declines deep enough to qualify

Longest recovery

1,132 days

From the 30 November 2013 peak

Still pending

1

One decline has not been regained

The recovery record

Two intervals are shown for each episode, and the difference between them is the point of the table. The trough-to-peak column measures how long the climb back took once the bottom was in. The peak-to-peak column measures the whole ordeal, from the moment the old high was set to the moment it was finally exceeded. The second figure is always the larger, and it is the one that describes what a holder who bought at the top actually endured. A decline of a few hundred days can sit inside a recovery of more than a thousand.

Major Bitcoin declines with peak and trough dates, depth, decline duration, recovery date, trough-to-peak duration and peak-to-peak duration.
Peak dateTrough dateDepthDeclineRecoveredTrough to peakPeak to peak
8 June 201118 November 2011-93.8%163 days1 February 2013441 days604 days
30 November 201314 January 2015-85.0%410 days5 January 2017722 days1,132 days
17 December 201715 December 2018-83.9%363 days16 December 2020732 days1,095 days
10 November 202121 November 2022-77.5%376 days5 March 2024470 days846 days
6 October 202521 November 2025-36.1%46 daysStill pending——

2011-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014

Pending recoveries. One episode in this table has no recovery date, because the price has not yet regained the peak that preceded it. Those rows are labelled Still pending rather than given an estimated date. A recovery that has not happened cannot be dated, and projecting one would turn a record into a forecast.

Why recovery is measured from the peak

There are two defensible ways to measure how long a crash lasted, and they answer different questions. Measuring from the trough asks how long the recovery rally took once the worst was over. Measuring from the peak asks how long the market took to make a new high. The first is a fact about the rally; the second is a fact about the holder. This page reports both, and leads with the second, because the reader who is trying to understand the risk of buying near a top is asking the second question.

The gap between the two figures is the time spent falling. A decline that takes a year to complete and two years to recover produces a peak-to-peak interval of three years, of which only the last two are upward. That asymmetry — long falls, longer climbs — is a general property of deep drawdowns, and it is why the recovery figures are consistently larger than the decline figures in the table above.

It is worth being explicit about what these numbers assume. They assume the holder stayed. A recovery duration is the time the market took to regain a level, not the time any particular investor took to break even, because an investor who sold at the trough never recovered at all. The figures also assume the peak in question was actually exceeded, which is true for every episode except the pending one. Both assumptions are reasonable for a description of the market and neither is a statement about any individual's outcome.

The drawdown record publishes the depth of each of these episodes alongside its recovery, and the all-time high history shows the peaks these recoveries were measured against.

Related reading