Crypto bear market - 2012 - 2024 comparison

Bear Markets

If you’re a crypto investor, you might feel like the current bear market is never going to end. But history shows that is unlikely to be the case. Bitcoin has been declared dead more than 300 times over the course of its nine-year lifespan. To gain a little perspective, it’s worth analyzing the various bear markets since Bitcoin’s inception through 2018, and highlighting the different catalysts that drove prices and overall social sentiment into a tailspin.

We broke down cryptocurrencies into different bear-market periods. For our analysis, we define a bear market as a minimum of a 20 percent drop in price lasting for at least 2 months in time. Through this definition, we discovered four major bear market periods over the course of Bitcoin’s life, excluding the prolonged bear market of 2018 and onward.

Compare crypto bear vs bull market

Bear — Bull Market 1 (December 12, 2011 — January 15, 2012 — February 18, 2012)

Bear — Bull Market 2 (December 12, 2011 — January 15, 2012 — February 18, 2012)

Bear — Bull Market 3 (October 26, 2012 — November 30, 2013 — January 04, 2015)

Bear — Bull Market 4 (December 21, 2016 — December 18, 2017 — December 15, 2018)

Current Bear — Bull Market (October 18, 2024 — December 17, 2024 — December 21, 2024)