9 Biggest Bitcoin Crashes in History

The crypto market crash on October 10, 2025 wiped out an unprecedented $19 billion worth of Bitcoin and other crypto holdings. But it was far from one of the largest percentage drops in the price of BTC ever.

From Mount Gox’s penny trade to the FTX collapse, here’s every time Bitcoin’s price crashed hard—and the circumstances that caused it.

1.Mount Gox Flash Crash (June 2011)

This is the big one. Bitcoin fell about 99.9% on Mount Gox after a hacker stole hundreds of thousands of BTCs and sold them for just a penny. At the time, Mount Gox facilitated approximately 90% of all Bitcoin trading. Because Mount Gox dominated Bitcoin trading at the time, the internal collapse of the exchange briefly erased almost the entire value of the market.

(According to Guiness World Records, Mount Gox was the most dominant, but not the first, Bitcoin exchange. That title is owned by BitcoinMarket.)

The Mt. Gox hack actually happened on June 15, 2011, but was not disclosed until a few days later. A Mount Gox accountant account was compromised and used to steal 740,000 BTC from customers and 100,000 from the company itself. When the exploiter dumped the BTC, the price plummeted to mere cents.

At the time, that amount of Bitcoin would have been worth about $460,000. At current prices, 840,000 Bitcoin would be worth just under $94 billion. That equates to the entire BTC treasuries of Michael Saylor’s Strategy, Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings, Jack Maller’s XXI, Japanese BTC juggernaut Metaplanet, Adam Back’s Bitcoin Standard Treasury Co., and the newly public Bullish.

2.Mount Gox Meltdown (April 2013)

Bitcoin fell from $265 to $150 and lost about 43% in April 2013 thanks to what Mt. Gox would later call distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. In a DDoS attack, a target URL is flooded with external requests to prevent legitimate users from accessing it.

The attack left trading at Mount Gox at a standstill amid record traffic, leading to a sharp sell-off.

Mount Gox said the attacks had become frustratingly common at the time. “Attackers wait for the price of Bitcoins to reach a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everyone to panic sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times as we have seen in recent days and they profit,” the exchange wrote at the time, according to TechCrunch citing a now-deleted Facebook post.

3.China Ban Panic (December 2013)

In December 2013, the People’s Bank of China made it clear that they did not want banks to touch Bitcoin as it was not backed by any nation or central authority.

Bitcoin experienced a rapid rise. At the end of November, Bitcoin had climbed above $1,000 for the first time. By December 5, Bitcoin had risen above $1,200. But two days later, the stock fell about 50% to below $600 as investors digested the impact of the Chinese banking ban.

This is around the time former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan began publicly deriding Bitcoin as “a bubble.”

“You really have to test your imagination to deduce what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg. “I couldn’t do it. Maybe someone else can.”

4.Another China Ban (September 2017)

In early September 2017, China banned initial coin offerings (ICOs), calling it an “illegal” form of fundraising.

Initially, markets shrugged this off, viewing the measure as a crackdown on tokens rather than Bitcoin itself. But panic broke out a week later when reports emerged that Beijing would also force domestic stock exchanges to close. When BTCC, Huobi and OKCoin confirmed their closes on September 14 and 15, Bitcoin fell about 25% in two days – from about $4,400 to $3,300.

The sell-off marked the end of Chinese dominance in crypto trading and shifted global liquidity to Japan and Korea.

5.Use Relax (December 2017)

At the end of 2017, Bitcoin was in a slump and approached the $20,000 mark for the first time in its history.

When Bitcoin futures hit the regulated exchanges and overly warm sentiment caused a decline, BTC fell from around $16,500 on December 22 to around $11,000 the next day. Within 24 hours, Bitcoin lost about a third of its value, 33.3%, marking the beginning of a bear market that would last a year.

Chicago Board Options Futures Exchange (CBOE) and Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) had just launched cash-settled Bitcoin futures contracts.

It’s not like crypto-native Bitcoin derivatives exchanges didn’t already exist: Deribit, BitMEX, and Kraken were all active at the time. But the crypto-native companies at the time were offshore or unregulated. The Wall Street suits preferred to use locations that were already licensed by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.

Months later, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published a report blaming the introduction of futures for the December crash.

“The rapid run-up and subsequent fall in prices after the introduction of futures does not appear to be a coincidence,” the bank writes. “Rather, it is consistent with the trading behavior that typically accompanies the introduction of asset futures markets.”

6.COVID: “Black Thursday” (March 12, 2020)

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic caused investors to panic and send Bitcoin into one of its biggest crashes.

The BTC crash occurred the day after the World Health Organization officially declared a global pandemic. The next day, BTC started just below $8,000 and then plummeted to around $4,850, losing almost half of its value.

More than $1 billion in leveraged long positions were liquidated that day, forcing sales across BitMEX, Binance and other exchanges.

The crash was so serious that it earned the nickname “Black Thursday.” But the good news is that the breakout preceded a bullish year in which BTC broke every record imaginable.

7.Crackdown on China: “Black Wednesday” (May 19, 2021)

In mid-May, BTC investors were in an uproar when Tesla suddenly pulled the plug on its plans to accept Bitcoin as payment for its electronic vehicles. The market recovered, but traders were only given a brief reprieve.

A week later, the People’s Bank of China cracked down on Bitcoin miners, sending prices into freefall and plummeting the BTC hashrate (the amount of mining power that helps secure the network).

Within hours of Beijing reiterating its ban on crypto transactions, panic selling and successive liquidations wiped out about $8 billion in leveraged positions.

This one was bad enough to have earned the nickname Black Wednesday. In the span of about 12 hours, Bitcoin fell about 30% from about $43,000 to $30,000. The losses didn’t stop there. On June 22, 2021, Bitcoin had dipped below $30,000 for the first time in six months.

8.Freezing and contamination at Celsius (June 13, 2022)

Cryptocurrency lender Celsius froze withdrawals and swaps on June 12, citing “extreme market conditions.” The move came just two months after TerraUSD’s collapse and sparked fears of a broader liquidity crisis.

It had only been two months since the colossal collapse of TerraUSD, Terraform Labs’ algorithmic stablecoin. The token was designed to remain pegged 1:1 to the US dollar, but ended up at 13 cents as it fell apart at the seams.

So when Celsius froze withdrawals, saying this was done to “stabilize liquidity,” investors panicked. In its heyday, Celsius offered customers high returns on crypto deposits. But when customers suddenly lost access to their funds on the platform, Bitcoin took the brunt.

On the day the announcement was made, Bitcoin started around $26,000 and then fell 15% to below $22,000.

9.FTX teeters ahead of bankruptcy (November 8-9, 2022)

When reports surfaced that Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange was facing a liquidity shortage, panic engulfed the market.

On November 8, Bitcoin fell more than 17% in 24 hours, from around $20,500 to $16,900, briefly reaching $15,600 when FTX halted withdrawals.

Within days, FTX filed for bankruptcy – a collapse that would ripple through the entire crypto industry and repercussions would be felt for the next two years.