A drawdown is the decline from an asset's peak price to its subsequent trough, and bitcoin's documented drawdowns rank among the deepest of any widely traded asset. From its November 10, 2021 high of about $68,700 to its November 21, 2022 low near $15,700, bitcoin fell roughly 77 percent, per Coin Metrics data.
Horison publishes information, not investment advice, and what any drawdown history means for a reader depends on individual circumstances, time horizon, and risk capacity that this site cannot know. Historical figures are descriptive, and this site never projects past recoveries forward. The volatility disclosure that governs this coverage is literal: crypto assets can lose most or all of their value quickly.
How Is a Drawdown Measured?
A drawdown is measured peak to trough within a single episode: the percentage decline from the highest price before the decline to the lowest price before a sustained recovery begins. It differs from annualized volatility, which describes the typical size of day-to-day swings. Drawdowns capture the worst experienced path, and they compound: an 80 percent decline requires a 400 percent gain merely to return to the starting point. Reporting conventions matter, since intraday and closing bases give slightly different figures.
The figure quoted for each episode below uses daily closing prices from Coin Metrics' reference data, with dates and levels rounded. Other reputable series can differ by a point or two on the extremes while telling the same story. The relative ranking, four bitcoin declines between roughly 77 and 93 percent, is stable across sources.
What Does Bitcoin's Drawdown Record Show?
Bitcoin has completed four drawdowns deeper than 75 percent in its documented history, each following a cycle top, and each so far followed by a recovery to new highs, with the most recent new high recorded in December 2024. The table lists the episodes.
| Cycle | Peak (date) | Trough (date) | Depth | Recovery to new high |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 | ~$31.9 (June 2011) | ~$2.0 (November 2011) | ~-93% | 2013 |
| 2013-2015 | ~$1,163 (December 2013) | ~$152 (January 2015) | ~-87% | 2017 |
| 2017-2018 | ~$19,783 (December 2017) | ~$3,122 (December 2018) | ~-84% | Late 2020 |
| 2021-2022 | ~$68,789 (November 2021) | ~$15,760 (November 2022) | ~-77% | March 2024 |
Source: Coin Metrics daily closing series for each period shown. The same series recorded bitcoin's first daily close above $100,000 on December 5, 2024, roughly two and a half years after the 2022 low. That recovery is a fact about the past, not a property of future episodes.
How Do Other Crypto Assets Compare?
Ethereum's record shows deeper extremes. Its January 2018 cycle high near $1,432 gave way to a December 2018 trough near $83, a decline of roughly 94 percent, and its November 2021 peak near $4,891 fell to about $879 by June 2022, roughly 82 percent, per Coin Metrics data. Assets further down the size ranking have done worse: Terra's LUNA collapsed by more than 99.99 percent in May 2022, from about $119 to fractions of a cent, alongside the failure of its sister stablecoin. Complete loss, not merely deep decline, is a documented outcome for individual tokens.
The equity comparison frames the scale. The S&P 500 fell about 57 percent in the 2007-2009 financial crisis, and the Nasdaq composite fell about 78 percent from its 2000 peak to its 2002 trough, per index history. The 2020 pandemic crash cut the S&P 500 roughly 34 percent in five weeks. Bitcoin's four episodes of 77 percent or worse happened within roughly a dozen years, alongside a roughly 50 percent two-day fall in March 2020, a frequency and depth that equity indices have not approached in the same period.
How Long Have Recoveries Taken?
The documented pattern across bitcoin's four major drawdowns is recovery measured in years, not weeks. The 2011 trough recovered to a new high within about two years, the 2015 trough within about two, the 2018 trough within about two, and the 2022 trough within a bit over two, on the dates in the table above. Those spans describe what happened. They establish nothing about any future episode, a distinction this site treats as binding rather than rhetorical.
Recovery duration interacts with holding period in a way that makes horizon central. An investor with a multi-year horizon and an allocation sized to their circumstances experiences a drawdown differently than one who needs the funds near the trough. Drawdown statistics are therefore not stand-alone guidance; they are inputs into questions about liquidity needs, time horizon, and risk capacity that only individual circumstances can answer.
What Drove the Deepest Episodes?
Each major drawdown had a documented catalyst structure. The 2018 decline followed a retail-led mania year and a sequence of exchange failures and initial-coin-offering unwinds. The March 2020 crash was a global liquidity event, in which bitcoin fell about half in two days alongside repeated equity circuit breakers. The 2021-2022 episode combined macro tightening with internal credit blowups: the Terra collapse in May 2022, lender insolvencies through the summer, and the FTX exchange failure in November 2022 at the trough.
The BBC's December 2022 retrospective on the FTX aftermath recorded bitcoin hovering under $18,000, down about 70 percent from its peak, while industry layoffs and bankruptcies continued. The retrospective also captured the recurring pattern in these episodes: leverage and opaque intermediaries amplified price declines that began with macro pressure. Volatility arrived from both outside the system and inside it.
What Should Volatility Mean to a Reader?
Volatility numbers translate drawdown history into forward-looking caution. Bitcoin's realized annualized volatility ran roughly four times that of broad equity indices across 2020-2024, per Coin Metrics and Bloomberg data, which means the same position size carries several times the swing. An illustrative calculation, with all assumptions stated: at 70 percent annualized volatility, roughly one standard deviation on a $10,000 position is about $7,000, before considering that realized drawdowns in the record ran deeper.
- Depth: documented bitcoin declines of 77 to 93 percent; ether to 94 percent; individual tokens to effectively 100 percent.
- Speed: a ~50 percent two-day fall in March 2020; multi-week halvings in 2021-2022.
- Duration: recoveries measured in years in every documented cycle.
These are the facts this site's volatility disclosure rests on. Crypto assets can lose most or all of their value quickly, and the historical record shows exactly that outcome, in multiple cycles, at the market's center rather than its edges. Any reader's response belongs to their own circumstances, weighed with the same discipline applied to any other volatile asset.
For more context, read How Crypto Correlates With Stocks and Bonds.
For more context, read bitcoin dominance.
For more context, read What Dollar-Cost Averaging Means for Crypto Investors.
