History · 2010 to 2026 Every Bitcoin crash, and what came after

Bitcoin was barely 19 months old and worth a few cents when someone found a hole in its rules. On 15 August 2010, block 74,638 contained a transaction that created more than 184 billion bitcoin out of nothing, split between two addresses. The code that checked transactions had not been written for numbers so large that adding them together overflowed.

For a system whose whole promise was a fixed supply of 21 million coins, it was an existential moment. Satoshi Nakamoto and the handful of early developers published a fixed version of the software within about five hours. Miners who upgraded started building a new chain without the bad block, and on 16 August, at block 74,691, the corrected chain overtook the broken one.

There was hardly a market to crash, but this was Bitcoin's first real crisis, and it set the pattern for every one that followed: the network survived because enough people chose to run the fixed rules.

In the spring of 2011 Bitcoin went from obscurity to headlines. A magazine story about an untraceable internet currency sent new buyers flooding in, and on the Mt. Gox exchange the price climbed from under $1 to about $32 in early June.

Then Mt. Gox was breached. An attacker used a compromised account to dump a huge pile of bitcoin onto the exchange, and for a few surreal minutes on 19 June the price on Mt. Gox fell to a single cent. Trading was halted for days and the trades were rolled back, but the spell was broken.

What followed was slower and more painful. Through the summer and autumn the price bled away, falling to around $2 by November, a loss of more than 90%. Many early believers sold, and the press declared the experiment over. It took until early 2013 for the price to climb back above its 2011 high.

In late 2011 a user known as “pirateat40”, later identified as Trendon Shavers, began offering an investment with an impossible promise: 7% interest per week, paid in bitcoin. He called it Bitcoin Savings & Trust, and in a small, trusting community it grew into the biggest operation in the Bitcoin economy.

In August 2012 it began to unravel. Pirate announced he was closing, and on 28 August he defaulted. Fear of how many coins might be dumped, and how much money had simply vanished, sent the price from about $15 to under $7 in a matter of days.

The US Securities and Exchange Commission later charged Shavers with running a Ponzi scheme, one of the first fraud cases involving Bitcoin. Bitcoin itself recovered within months, but the episode was an early lesson in a pattern that would return again and again: the scams around Bitcoin did more damage than any flaw inside it.

The banking crisis in Cyprus in March 2013, where savers saw part of their deposits seized, gave Bitcoin a new story: money that no government could freeze. The price rocketed from about $13 in January to $266 on Mt. Gox on 10 April.

Mt. Gox, which handled most of the world’s Bitcoin trading, could not keep up. Orders lagged, the site slowed under heavy traffic and attacks, and traders who could not see the real price panicked. Within a day the price had roughly halved, and Mt. Gox halted trading to let the market cool down. At the worst moments that week bitcoin changed hands for around $50.

The crash exposed how fragile the infrastructure still was. Yet by the end of the year Bitcoin was trading above $1,000. The demand that had caused the bubble had not gone away; only the plumbing had failed.

By late November 2013 Bitcoin had passed $1,000, driven by a buying frenzy in China. On 5 December the People’s Bank of China ruled that banks and payment companies could not handle Bitcoin. Within days the price had fallen by about half.

The real blow came from Tokyo. In February 2014 Mt. Gox stopped all withdrawals, and at the end of the month it filed for bankruptcy, saying about 850,000 bitcoin belonging to customers and the company had gone missing over years of hacks and mismanagement. About 200,000 were later found. At the time it was roughly 7% of all bitcoin in existence.

What followed was Bitcoin’s longest winter so far. The price slid through 2014 and touched about $170 in January 2015, more than 85% below the peak. Creditors would wait a decade for repayment. It took until early 2017 for Bitcoin to reclaim its 2013 high, but the industry that rebuilt after Mt. Gox was larger, more professional and more careful.

Two years after Mt. Gox, the market was quietly recovering when Hong Kong-based Bitfinex, one of the largest exchanges, announced a security breach. Hackers had stolen 119,756 bitcoin, worth about $70 million at the time.

The price fell from about $650 to around $540, close to 20%, as traders feared another Mt. Gox. Bitfinex did not go bankrupt. Instead it spread the loss across all of its customers, cutting balances by about 36% and handing out tokens it promised to buy back, which it did within a year.

The story had a remarkable ending. In 2022 US authorities seized most of the stolen coins, by then worth billions of dollars, and arrested a New York couple who later pleaded guilty to laundering them. The market had recovered within months; the stolen bitcoin took six years to surface.

In 2017 the world discovered crypto. Thousands of new tokens were sold to the public through initial coin offerings, and a large share of the trading happened in China. On 4 September Chinese regulators declared ICOs illegal fundraising and ordered them stopped.

Days later, reports spread that Chinese exchanges would be forced to close, and the largest ones confirmed it. Bitcoin, which had just touched about $4,950, fell to around $3,000 by mid-September, a drop of roughly 40% in two weeks.

It barely mattered. Trading moved offshore, and by mid-October Bitcoin was at new records. The crash became a footnote in the year of the great mania, but it showed that even the world’s second-largest economy could not switch Bitcoin off.

In December 2017 Bitcoin was on taxi drivers’ lips and morning television. The price touched about $19,700 on 17 December, the same day bitcoin futures started trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange. For the first time, big investors could easily bet on the price falling.

The descent began almost at once. In January 2018 South Korea tightened rules on trading, and the Japanese exchange Coincheck lost about $530 million in tokens to hackers. Most ICO tokens collapsed toward zero, and banks banned card purchases of crypto. In November a bitter split in the Bitcoin Cash community broke the price through $6,000, and by mid-December Bitcoin was near $3,200, down 84%.

The year earned a name: crypto winter. Thousands of projects died and the tourists left. But developers kept building, and the Lightning Network for fast payments went live that year. It took three years, until December 2020, for Bitcoin to pass its 2017 high.

In early 2020 Bitcoin was recovering, back above $10,000 in February, with a halving expected in May. Then COVID-19 spread around the world. On 11 March the World Health Organization declared a pandemic, and on 12 March every market on earth seemed to sell at once.

Bitcoin lost almost 40% that day, one of the worst single days in its history. Leveraged traders were wiped out in waves; more than a billion dollars of long positions were liquidated, and on the BitMEX exchange the price briefly fell below $4,000 before the platform went offline. From the evening before, it was a fall of about half.

The recovery was just as dramatic. Central banks and governments unleashed trillions of dollars of support, and the case for a fixed-supply asset suddenly sounded urgent to new investors. Bitcoin was back above its pre-crash level within weeks, halved its reward in May and ended 2020 near $29,000.

Spring 2021 was euphoric. Tesla had announced a $1.5 billion purchase of bitcoin and said it would accept it as payment for cars. Coinbase listed on the Nasdaq, and on 14 April Bitcoin reached about $64,800, a new record.

On 12 May, a single post reversed the mood. Elon Musk said Tesla would stop accepting bitcoin, citing the fossil fuels burned by mining. The man who had done more than anyone to bring Bitcoin into the mainstream that year was now its most famous critic. Within a day the price fell to around $46,000.

The episode started a fierce debate about Bitcoin’s energy use that pushed miners toward renewable power and transparency reports. Tesla kept most of its coins for another year. Bitcoin passed its April record in October, without needing Tesla’s approval.

A week after Tesla’s reversal, China reiterated its ban on crypto transactions and signalled a crackdown on mining. On 19 May, remembered as Black Wednesday, Bitcoin fell about 30% within hours, briefly touching $30,000, and billions of dollars of leveraged positions were liquidated.

Then came the hammer. Over the following weeks Chinese provinces ordered mining farms to shut down, and the country that had hosted most of the world’s mining switched it off almost overnight. About half of the network’s computing power went dark, and in July Bitcoin touched about $29,000, some 55% below its April record.

The network barely blinked. Blocks slowed for a while, the difficulty adjusted down, and miners shipped their machines to the United States, Kazakhstan and elsewhere. In October Bitcoin set a new record. The world’s biggest mining country had left, and Bitcoin had become more decentralised, not less.

Bitcoin had peaked at about $69,000 in November 2021, just as the Federal Reserve prepared to raise interest rates fast. By spring 2022 it was already well down, but the real damage came from a project that promised something impossible: a stablecoin backed by nothing but an algorithm.

TerraUSD was supposed to hold a value of one dollar, kept in balance by its sister token, Luna, and lured savers with a 20% yield. On 9 May it slipped below its peg and never recovered. Within days Luna fell to almost nothing and about $40 billion of value disappeared. The project’s backers had bought tens of thousands of bitcoin as a reserve, and sold them in a failed rescue.

Bitcoin fell from about $40,000 to around $26,700 by 12 May. Millions of people, many of them in Asia, lost their savings. Terra’s founder was later convicted of fraud. It was the first domino in a year that would bring down much of the industry around Bitcoin.

The Terra collapse exposed who had been lending to whom. On 12 June the crypto lender Celsius, which had taken deposits from more than a million customers with promises of high interest, froze all withdrawals, citing extreme market conditions.

Days later it emerged that Three Arrows Capital, one of the biggest crypto hedge funds, could not meet its loans after heavy losses on Luna. Lenders that had trusted it, from Voyager to BlockFi, were dragged down with it. Celsius, Voyager and Three Arrows all ended in bankruptcy that summer.

Bitcoin broke below its 2017 high of about $20,000 for the first time and touched about $17,600 on 18 June. Celsius customers waited years to get part of their money back, and its founder was later sentenced to prison. The lesson was brutal: lending your coins for yield turns them into a loan to someone you cannot see.

By autumn 2022 FTX looked like the winner of the crisis. It was the world’s second-largest exchange, its founder was on magazine covers and in Washington, and it had stepped in to rescue failing rivals.

On 2 November a report revealed that much of the balance sheet of Alameda Research, FTX’s sister trading firm, was made of FTX’s own token. Days later Binance said it would sell its holdings, and customers rushed to withdraw. On 8 November FTX stopped processing withdrawals. On 11 November it filed for bankruptcy, with a hole of billions of dollars of customer money. Its founder was later convicted of fraud and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Bitcoin fell from about $21,000 to around $15,500, its lowest point of the cycle and 77% below the 2021 record. It was the end of a year in which almost every company that had promised safety on top of Bitcoin failed, while the Bitcoin network itself kept producing a block every ten minutes.

In March 2023 the crisis came from the traditional banking system. Silvergate, a bank used by many crypto firms, announced it would wind down, and on 10 March Silicon Valley Bank collapsed in the second-largest bank failure in US history. Bitcoin slipped below $20,000.

The next day it emerged that Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, had $3.3 billion of reserves stuck at SVB. USDC, supposed to be worth exactly one dollar, briefly fell to about 87 cents. For a weekend it looked as though a banking crisis might become a crypto crisis.

Instead, it became a reminder of why Bitcoin exists. When US authorities guaranteed SVB’s deposits, the panic eased, and Bitcoin rose above $28,000 within ten days. The crash that wasn’t became the start of the next rally.

For years, investors had borrowed cheaply in Japanese yen and invested the money elsewhere, from US tech stocks to crypto. On 31 July 2024 the Bank of Japan raised interest rates. The yen jumped, and the borrowed money had to be paid back fast.

On Monday 5 August the unwind hit everything. Japan’s Nikkei index had its worst day since 1987, and Bitcoin, which had been near $70,000 a week earlier, crashed about 18% in a day to roughly $50,000, briefly trading around $49,000. Crypto markets saw heavy liquidations as leveraged positions were forced closed.

Calm returned within days once the Bank of Japan signalled it would not rush further hikes. Three months later Bitcoin was making new records after the US election. The episode showed how tightly Bitcoin had become tied to global money flows.

Bitcoin had just set an all-time high of about $126,000 on 6 October 2025, and leverage in the market was at record levels. On the afternoon of Friday 10 October, US time, President Trump announced a 100% tariff on Chinese imports.

Hours later, as US markets closed for the weekend, the selling turned into a cascade. Over $19 billion of leveraged positions were forcibly closed and more than 1.6 million traders were liquidated, the largest event of its kind on record. About $3.2 billion was wiped out in a single minute. On Binance, the stablecoin USDe briefly traded at 65 cents, and some altcoins lost a third of their value in minutes.

Bitcoin fell about 15% from its Friday high to around $104,800. It was not the deepest fall in percentage terms, but it broke the market’s confidence. In hindsight, 10 October marked the turning point from the record of 2025 to the bear market of 2026.

After the October shock, Bitcoin never regained its footing. It slipped below $90,000 by December, rallied to about $98,000 in January 2026, and then fell hard. Geopolitical tension, a broad sell-off in tech stocks and the nomination of Kevin Warsh to lead the Federal Reserve weighed on risk assets, while investors pulled billions of dollars out of spot bitcoin ETFs.

On 5 February 2026 Bitcoin fell 17% in a day, briefly touching about $60,250, more than half below its record only four months earlier. Futures traders shed tens of billions of dollars of leverage, and miners who had borrowed to move into AI data centres sold coins to support their balance sheets.

The pressure returned in early summer. Strategy, the company that had become Bitcoin’s most famous buyer, disclosed its first-ever sale of bitcoin, ETF outflows continued and a wallet linked to Mt. Gox moved about $950 million of coins. On 30 June Bitcoin slid below $58,000, about 54% under its peak. By October it had recovered to the low $80,000s. Whether that was the bottom is a question only the next chapter can answer.

The most recent shock came from the exchange that had dominated the market since 2018. On the afternoon of 29 October 2026, attackers drained Binance hot wallets across about ten blockchains in roughly 20 minutes, taking about $6.3 billion, including around 18,270 bitcoin. US authorities and blockchain analysts attributed the attack to North Korean hackers.

Binance halted withdrawals and said its users would not bear the loss, and stablecoin issuers froze about $3 billion of the stolen funds within hours. Bitcoin fell about 4% that day and touched about $76,200 the next, as spot ETFs recorded $643 million of outflows. October 2026 closed 7.3% lower, the weakest October since 2014.

It was a smaller fall than Mt. Gox had caused twelve years earlier, and Binance said within two days that it had replaced 90% of the losses. But the lesson was the same one Bitcoin has been teaching since 2011.