9 Biggest Bitcoin Crashes in History

The Oct. 10, 2025, crypto market crash wiped out an unprecedented $19 billion worth of leveraged Bitcoin and other crypto positions. But it was far from one of the biggest percentage drops in the price of BTC on record.

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

1.Mt. Gox Flash Crash (June 2011)

This is the big one. Bitcoin dropped approximately 99.9% on Mt. Gox after a hacker stole hundreds of thousands worth of BTC and sold it for just a penny. At the time, Mt. Gox facilitated roughly 90% of all Bitcoin trading. Because Mt. Gox dominated Bitcoin trading at the time, the exchange’s internal collapse briefly erased nearly the entire market’s value.

(Mt. Gox was the most dominant, but not the first, Bitcoin exchange, according to Guiness World Records. That title belongs to BitcoinMarket.)

The Mt. Gox hack actually occurred on June 15, 2011, but wasn’t disclosed until a few days later. A Mt. Gox auditor 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 just pennies.

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

2.Mt. Gox Meltdown (April 2013)

Bitcoin dove from $265 to $150, losing about 43%, in April 2013 thanks to what Mt. Gox would later call distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks. A DDoS attack overwhelms a target URL with external requests to stop it from being accessed by legitimate users.

The attack meant that trading on Mt. Gox kept freezing amid record traffic and prompted a sharp sell-off.

Mt. Gox said at the time the attacks had become frustratingly common. “Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody 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 like we saw over the past few 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 they did not want banks touching Bitcoin because it was not backed by any nation or central authority.

Bitcoin had been experiencing a rapid rise. In late November, Bitcoin had climbed above $1,000 for the first time. On Dec. 5, Bitcoin had risen above $1,200. But two days later, it slipped about 50% to below $600 as investors digested the impact of China’s banking ban.

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

“You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg. “I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.”

4.Another China Ban (September 2017)

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

At first, markets brushed it off, viewing the move as a crackdown on tokens rather than Bitcoin itself. But panic set in a week later when reports emerged that Beijing would also force domestic exchanges to close. As BTCC, Huobi, and OKCoin confirmed their shutdowns on September 14 and 15, Bitcoin plunged about 25% in two days—from roughly $4,400 to $3,300.

The selloff marked the end of China’s dominance in crypto trading and shifted global liquidity to Japan and Korea.

5.Leverage Unwind (December 2017)

By late 2017, Bitcoin had been on a tear and was nearing the $20,000 mark for the first time in its history.

Then Bitcoin futures hitting regulated exchanges and too-hot sentiment created a drop that saw BTC fall from about $16,500 on Dec. 22 to about $11,000 the next day. In 24 hours, Bitcoin lost roughly one-third of its value, 33.3%, marking the beginning of a year-long bear market.

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

It’s not that there weren’t already crypto native Bitcoin derivatives exchanges—Deribit, BitMEX, and Kraken were all active at the time. But the crypto native firms were offshore or unregulated then. The Wall Street suits preferred to use venues that already had licenses from 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 the price after the introduction of futures does not appear to be a coincidence,” the bank wrote. “Rather, it is consistent with trading behavior that typically accompanies the introduction of futures markets for an asset.”

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

The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic sent investors into a panic and Bitcoin into one of its biggest crashes.

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

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

The crash was severe enough to have earned the “Black Thursday” moniker. But the good news is that the wipe out preceded a bullish year, during which BTC smashed every conceivable record.

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

In mid-May, BTC investors were rattled when Tesla suddenly yanked the plug on its plans to accept Bitcoin as payment for its electronic vehicles. The market recovered, but traders only got a short reprieve.

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

Within hours of Beijing reiterating its ban on crypto transactions, panic selling and cascading liquidations wiped roughly $8 billion from leveraged positions.

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

8.Celsius Freeze and Contagion (June 13, 2022)

Crypto 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 stay pegged 1:1 to the U.S. dollar, but bottomed out at 13 cents as it came apart at the seams.

So when Celsius froze withdrawals, saying it was done to “stabilize liquidity,” investors panicked. In its heyday, Celsius offered customers high yield for crypto deposits. But when customers were suddenly cut off from their funds on the platform, Bitcoin bore the brunt.

The day the announcement went out, Bitcoin started around $26,000 and then fell 15% to below $22,000.

9.FTX Wobbles Ahead of Bankruptcy (Nov. 8-9, 2022)

When reports surfaced that Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX exchange faced a liquidity shortfall, panic swept the market.

On Nov. 8, Bitcoin fell more than 17% in 24 hours, from about $20,500 to $16,900, and briefly touched $15,600 as FTX halted withdrawals.

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