Research hub
The market-cycle explorer
2010-2025Source: Coinbase Exchange daily candles; Bitstamp and CoinDesk historical series for 2010-2014Each cycle is measured from a documented market low to the next documented market high, using the curated market-extremes table. The return is the ratio of the high to the low expressed in basis points, and the duration is the number of calendar days between the two dates. The cycles are defined by the documented extremes rather than by a mechanical rule, so the boundaries are judgement calls recorded in the extremes table. The final cycle is still open: its high is the most recent all-time high and no subsequent low has been confirmed.
Choose a cycle
Pick one of the completed advances below. The panel beneath it reports the low and the high that bound the cycle, the gain between them, the multiple it represents and how long the move took — all read from the site's curated cycle record.
2011 cycle
The advance ran from the closing low on 17 July 2010 to the closing high on 8 June 2011, gaining 63900% over 326 days.
Cycle low
$0
17 July 2010
Cycle high
$32
8 June 2011
Gain
63900%
640.0× the low
Duration
326 days
Low to high
The drawdown that followed
After the high, the price fell -94% to a trough of $2 on 18 November 2011.
Drawdown depth
-94%
From the 8 June 2011 high
Trough
$2
18 November 2011
Time to recovery
603 days
Back at the high on 1 February 2013
How the figures are bounded. The low is the lowest closing price between the previous high and the start of the advance; the high is the highest closing price before the next decline began. Both are identified in retrospect, which is the only way they can be identified, so the panel describes what happened rather than signalling what to do next.
Reading the cycles together
The most striking feature of the record is the decline in magnitude. The earliest cycles multiplied the price several times over; the most recent completed cycle multiplied it by a much smaller factor. A market with a larger capitalisation needs more money to move the same percentage, so the same enthusiasm produces a smaller gain. That is arithmetic rather than sentiment.
The duration tells the other half of the story. The early advances were compressed into a short span; the later ones took considerably longer to complete. A larger, more liquid market absorbs flows more slowly, and the instruments through which those flows arrive spread the buying over a longer period. The result is an advance that is smaller in percentage terms and longer in duration.
What has not changed is the shape. Every cycle in the record ends in a decline, and every decline has been deep enough to erase a large share of the advance. The magnitude of the fall has moderated alongside the magnitude of the rise, but the sequence — advance, peak, collapse, recovery — has repeated without exception.
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