Research · Altcoins · Quant Research

Comparative drawdowns: BTC, ETH, SOL and ICP

A drawdown is measured from a peak to the trough that follows it, and every part of that sentence is a decision. This page sets out how peak and trough dates are identified for the four assets, why the identification rule changes the answer, and what the unequal histories in the panel mean for a comparison.

Last reviewed 2026-09-21Source: Methodology reference; no dataset is published on this pagePeak and trough identification follows standard practice; no drawdown figure is asserted.

What a drawdown measures

A drawdown is the decline from a running peak to the lowest point reached before a new peak is set. It is expressed as a percentage below the peak, so a fall from a hundred to forty is a drawdown of sixty per cent. The maximum drawdown over a period is the largest such decline in that period, and it is the standard summary of downside risk because it describes the worst experience a holder who bought at the peak would have had.

A drawdown is not the same as a loss. A loss is realised when a position is sold below its cost; a drawdown is a decline in price that a holder may or may not have realised. A holder who bought before the peak and held through the trough experienced the drawdown on paper and no loss at all. The distinction matters because the maximum drawdown figure is often read as though it were the loss a typical holder took, and it is not: it is the loss a holder who bought at the exact peak and sold at the exact trough would have taken, which is the worst case rather than the typical one.

Two further measures are usually reported alongside the depth. The first is the duration, the time from the peak to the trough. The second is the recovery time, the time from the trough back to the previous peak. A deep drawdown that recovers quickly and a shallow one that takes years to recover are different experiences, and the depth alone does not distinguish them.

Identifying peaks and troughs

The peak and the trough are identified from the price series, and the identification rule is a choice. The simplest rule uses the daily close: the peak is the highest close before the decline and the trough is the lowest close before a new peak is set. The alternative uses the intraday high and low, which produces deeper drawdowns because the extremes within a day are further apart than the closes. The two rules can differ by several percentage points on the same episode, and a study that does not say which it used has not fully specified its result.

The second choice is the threshold for calling something a drawdown. A series that is measured continuously produces a great many small declines, and reporting all of them is noise. Most studies impose a minimum depth, commonly ten or twenty per cent, and report only the episodes that exceed it. The threshold is a convention rather than a property of the data, and it has to be stated because it decides how many episodes appear in the table.

The third choice is how to handle an episode that has not ended. If an asset is currently below its previous peak, the drawdown is ongoing: the trough is provisional and the recovery time is unknown. Reporting an ongoing drawdown as though it were complete, or omitting it because it has no recovery date, both mislead. The honest treatment is to include it and mark it as ongoing, with the trough date given as the lowest point reached so far.

The panel and its histories

The four assets in the comparative panel, the start of each price history, and what that means for a drawdown comparison.
Asset	Symbol	History begins	What it means for the comparison
Bitcoin	BTC	2010-07 (first exchange-quoted prices)	Contains every episode in the panel's history, including those before the other assets existed.
Ethereum	ETH	2015-08 (network launch)	Contains some but not all of Bitcoin's episodes, so a full-history comparison is not like-for-like.
Solana	SOL	2020-04 (mainnet beta)	Contains some but not all of Bitcoin's episodes, so a full-history comparison is not like-for-like.
Internet Computer	ICP	2021-05 (genesis / public launch)	The shortest series; it contains the fewest episodes and no full cycle of its own.

Last reviewed 2026-09-21Source: Project launch documentation and public price-series start datesStart dates are the first date a public daily series is available, not the date of any price event.

The unequal histories are more consequential for a drawdown study than for a volatility study, because drawdowns are episodic. A volatility figure computed over any window is a summary of that window; a maximum drawdown is the single worst episode in it. An asset whose history begins after the worst episode in the panel's period cannot have experienced it, and its maximum drawdown will therefore be smaller for a reason that has nothing to do with the asset's behaviour.

This is the central limitation of any comparative drawdown table, and it is not fixable by choosing a better window. A common window makes the comparison like-for-like and discards the episodes that make the comparison interesting. A full-history comparison includes those episodes and is not like-for-like. The study has to pick one and say which, and the reader has to read the table knowing which was chosen.

Method, dataset and limitations

The decisions a drawdown study has to state, and what each one changes about the episodes reported.
Decision	Options	What it changes
Price basis	Daily close; intraday high and low	Intraday extremes produce deeper drawdowns than closes on the same episode. The basis has to be stated for the depth to be reproducible.
Minimum depth	10 per cent; 20 per cent; none	The threshold decides how many episodes appear. Without one, the table fills with routine declines; with one, shallow episodes are omitted by construction.
Ongoing episodes	Included and marked; omitted	An asset below its previous peak has a provisional trough and no recovery date. Omitting it hides the current state; including it unmarked overstates completeness.
Recovery definition	Close above the previous peak; intraday touch of the peak	A close above the peak is the stricter and more common definition. An intraday touch can mark a recovery that did not hold.
Window	Common window; full history per asset	A common window is like-for-like and excludes earlier episodes; a full-history comparison includes them and is not like-for-like.

Last reviewed 2026-09-21Source: Methodology reference; standard drawdown practiceNo dataset is published on this page and no drawdown figure is asserted.

The dataset is the same panel of daily closes described on the volatility page, with the intraday series used only where the study states that it used them. The period is bounded by the shortest history in the panel for a common-window comparison, or stated per-asset for a full-history comparison. The retrieval date is recorded, and any day on which two sources disagree is reported.

The limitations are the ones above: an identification rule that is a choice, a depth threshold that is a convention, an ongoing episode that has no recovery date, and a panel whose members did not experience the same episodes. A drawdown table that states all of that is a description of the past. One that reports depths without them is a ranking dressed as a measurement.

Sources and references

The identification rules follow standard practice. The series a study would use are named and linked below.

Daily price series for the four assets. CoinGecko, CoinGecko API documentation: the historical daily close series used to build the return panel, with the retrieval date recorded on each study.
Reference and cross-check series. Coin Metrics, Community Network Data: an independent daily series used to check that a price move is not an artefact of a single venue's quote.
On-chain and market-structure context. Glassnode, Glassnode API documentation: the realised-capitalisation and supply series used to describe the market each asset trades in, not to compute the return panel.
Asset-level reference data. Messari, Messari API documentation: a third series used where the first two disagree, so the disagreement can be reported rather than hidden.
Bitcoin's own record, for the baseline. Bitcoin Data Guide, Bitcoin Price History and Data Sources & Methodology: the site's own compiled daily record and the provenance rules that apply to it.

Maximum drawdown and recovery time. Bacon, Practical Portfolio Performance Measurement and Attribution: the standard definitions of drawdown depth, duration and recovery.
Bitcoin's own drawdown record. Bitcoin Data Guide, Drawdown Explained and Recovery Time: what a drawdown is, and how long Bitcoin took to regain each previous peak.
Cycle structure, for the episodes a comparison covers. Bitcoin Data Guide, Cycle Comparison: the completed cycles set side by side, with the dates that define each phase.

Last reviewed 2026-09-21. No live market data is fetched or displayed on this page.