Drawdown From ATH

Data to 2026-09-22. On-chain metrics are fetched on a rotation, so this can trail the build by a few days.

How to read it

How far price sits below its own all-time high. Zero means a new record. This is the clearest available picture of what holding Bitcoin has actually felt like: drawdowns exceeding 80% have occurred in every major cycle, and lasted months to years.

How it's calculated

For each day, current close divided by the highest close to date, minus one.

What it did in past cycles

The three completed bear markets, measured close-to-close from the cycle peaks:

2013-12-04 → 2015-01-14 — $1,135 to $176, −84.5%, 406 days
2017-12-16 → 2018-12-15 — $19,641 to $3,185, −83.8%, 364 days
2021-11-08 → 2022-11-09 — $67,542 to $15,758, −76.7%, 366 days

All three bottomed between eleven and thirteen months after the top, and each fell slightly less far than the one before. From the October 2025 peak the deepest close so far is $58,525 on 2026-06-30, −53.1% and 267 days in.

Whether that is a shallower cycle or an unfinished one is not something this chart can answer, and it is worth resisting the temptation to assume the friendlier reading. Three observations of 'each one is milder' is also exactly what the first three points of a sequence look like before a fourth breaks it.

What it doesn't tell you

It uses daily closes, so intraday extremes are not captured, and it is denominated in dollars — the drawdown against gold or another currency differs. It is entirely backward-looking and says nothing about the depth of the next one.

The series on this chart also begins in September 2014, which is partway into the 2013–15 bear market. Its reading for that period understates the true fall, because the all-time high it measures against is the highest close it has seen rather than the December 2013 peak. Longer-history sources put that drawdown at 84.5%.

Reading it with other metrics

Realized volatility is the other half of the risk picture: drawdown is the worst case, volatility the everyday. Both have trended down across cycles.

MVRV and NUPL translate the same fall into holder terms — how far below cost basis the market has gone, which is what drives capitulation. The 200-week moving average gives the price level the deepest drawdowns have reached.