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Every Major Bitcoin Crash, Ranked by Depth and Recovery Time
Bitcoin's two deepest drawdowns on record — -83.4% into December 2018 and -76.6% into November 2022 — both took over a year just to bottom, and well over a year more to fully recover; the most recent major drawdown, down 53.1% from October 2025's peak, hasn't recovered yet.
Computed from real daily BTC/USD closes (Yahoo Finance), Sept 2014 onward — every peak-to-trough drawdown of 30% or more, ranked by depth.
Ranked by depth
| Peak | Trough | Depth | Days to bottom | Recovery |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 16, 2017 ($19,497) | Dec 15, 2018 ($3,237) | -83.4% | 364 days | 716 days (Nov 2020) |
| Nov 8, 2021 ($67,567) | Nov 21, 2022 ($15,787) | -76.6% | 378 days | 469 days (Mar 2024) |
| Apr 13, 2021 ($63,503) | Jul 20, 2021 ($29,807) | -53.1% | 98 days | 91 days (Oct 2021) |
| Oct 6, 2025 ($124,753) | Jun 30, 2026 ($58,559) | -53.1% | 267 days | Not yet recovered |
| Sep 1, 2017 ($4,892) | Sep 14, 2017 ($3,155) | -35.5% | 13 days | 28 days |
| Jun 11, 2017 ($2,958) | Jul 16, 2017 ($1,930) | -34.8% | 35 days | 20 days |
| Jan 4, 2017 ($1,155) | Jan 11, 2017 ($778) | -32.6% | 7 days | 43 days |
What "recovery" means here
Recovery is defined strictly: the date price first closes back at a new all-time high, not just a partial bounce. By that bar, the two largest crashes both took roughly two years from peak to full recovery — the 2018 crash bottomed in a year, then needed another two years on top of that before a new high was set in November 2020.
The pattern across cycles
The deepest crashes (-83%, -77%) both followed the most parabolic run-ups — 2017's and 2021's cycle tops — and both took the better part of a year just to find a bottom. The shallower ones (-33% to -35%, all in 2017) were faster in both directions: days to bottom, weeks to recover, inside a single ongoing bull run rather than a full cycle reset.
The most recent entry — a 53.1% drawdown from October 2025's $124,753 peak — is still open as of this writing. Its 267 days to bottom already sits between the fast 2017-style corrections and the year-plus grind of 2018 and 2022, and whether it resolves like the former or the latter isn't knowable in advance.
Limitations
Reliable daily BTC/USD pricing only goes back to September 2014, so the widely-reported 2013–2015 crash (from Bitcoin's first major bull run) isn't independently verified in this table. Figures use daily closes, not intraday extremes, so the true peak and trough on any given day may have been slightly more extreme than shown.
Educational content, not financial advice. See the disclosure.