Bitcoin is trading at approximately $62,852 on July 10, 2026. Put that next to its all-time high of $109,000 hit in January 2025, and the drawdown is roughly 42 percent, nearly $47,000 below peak.
The Fear and Greed Index sits at 22. Extreme fear by any measure. So is this Bitcoin’s worst bear market ever? The historical data says no. Not even close.
What the previous bear markets actually looked like
In 2011, Bitcoin fell 93 percent from $32 to $2. It recovered and went on to make new all-time highs. In 2013, it dropped 86 percent from $1,163 to $152, and spent over a year grinding through that trough before the next cycle began.
The 2018 bear market, still the most referenced comparison, saw Bitcoin fall 84 percent from $19,783 to $3,122. That took fourteen months to play out fully.
The 2022 cycle was fresher in memory, Bitcoin collapsed from $68,789 to $15,476, a decline of 77.5 percent, triggered by the collapse of Terra Luna, the FTX implosion, and the most aggressive Fed rate hiking cycle in four decades.
The current drawdown of 42 percent does not belong in that conversation. Not yet.
What makes this cycle feel worse than it is
Context matters. Bitcoin hit its all-time high just days before Trump’s second inauguration, front-running the most crypto-friendly administration in US history. When the expected institutional wave failed to materialize immediately, the sell-off felt like betrayal rather than a normal correction.
Spot Bitcoin ETFs, which attracted $35 billion in inflows through 2024 and early 2025, have since recorded consecutive weeks of net outflows.
The Coinbase Premium Index has stayed below zero for 46 straight days, pointing to a sustained absence of US institutional buying.
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The number that actually matters
$48,300-that is Bitcoin’s Investor Price, the level where every major bear market bottom has historically formed over the past 15 years, calculated by stripping out permanently lost coins to find the market’s true cost basis. It has not failed as a long-term accumulation signal in any prior cycle.
Anthony Scaramucci put the current mood in plain terms: “Every bottom looked like this.” Cathie Wood is holding her $730,000 price target for 2030 unchanged.
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