Bitcoin Halving Price History: Why This Cycle Broke the Pattern
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5 min read
Bitcoin is trading around $64,580 today. On April 19, 2024, the day of its last halving, it was trading around $63,762 (CoinDesk; Bitbo). Twenty-seven months, one all-time high near $126,200, and a 49% crash later, the price has come back to almost exactly where it started.
That is not what happened after the last two halvings. The Bitcoin halving price history shows a rally every single time, but this cycle's rally has already vanished in a way the other two never did. Here is what actually happened, cycle by cycle.
Roughly every four years, the Bitcoin network cuts in half the number of new bitcoin created and paid to miners for every block they add to the blockchain. This is coded into Bitcoin from the start and happens automatically, on a schedule based on block count, not a calendar date.
The reward has gone 50 BTC (before 2012) to 25 (2012), 12.5 (2016), 6.25 (2020), and 3.125 today (Kraken). Fewer new coins entering circulation, with demand unchanged, is the basic argument for why a halving should push the price up. Whether it actually does, on a useful timeline, is a separate question.
Four halvings have happened so far: November 2012, July 2016, May 2020 and April 2024. The first one is hard to compare fairly, since bitcoin went from about $12 to just over $1,000, a move so large mostly because the starting price was so small. The last three are a cleaner comparison.
| Halving | Price at halving | Peak | Peak price | Gain to peak |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| July 9, 2016 | ~$650 | Dec 17, 2017 | ~$19,700 | ~2,930% |
| May 11, 2020 | ~$8,700 | Nov 10, 2021 | ~$69,044 | ~694% |
| April 19, 2024 | ~$63,762 | Oct 6, 2025 | ~$126,198 | ~98% |
(Halving and peak prices from Kraken, Bitget, Bitbo, CarbonCredits and U.S. News, all retrieved 2026-08-06. Gains are self-derived from the two sourced prices in each row.)
Two things stand out immediately. Every peak landed 17 to 18 months after its halving, a genuinely consistent lag. And every cycle's percentage gain has been smaller than the one before it, which makes sense on its own: doubling a $650 asset takes far less new money than doubling a $63,762 one.
A rally that fully reverses is not new to bitcoin. Both prior cycles crashed hard after their peak too. The difference is how much of the rally survived, measured at the same point in each cycle: roughly ten months after the peak.
| Cycle | Peak | Price ~10 months after peak | Halving-day price | Still above halving price by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 halving | ~$19,700 (Dec 2017) | ~$6,300-6,600 (Oct 2018) | ~$650 | ~870% to 900% |
| 2020 halving | ~$69,044 (Nov 2021) | ~$20,050 (Aug 2022) | ~$8,700 | ~130% |
| 2024 halving | ~$126,198 (Oct 2025) | ~$64,580 (Aug 2026) | ~$63,762 | ~1%, essentially flat |
(October 2018 and August 2022 prices from StatMuse Money, retrieved 2026-08-06. Current price from CoinDesk, retrieved 2026-08-06.)
After the 2017 peak, bitcoin crashed roughly 68% into late 2018, and it was still up about 870 to 900% versus the 2016 halving price. After the 2021 peak, it crashed roughly 71% into mid-2022, and it was still up about 130% versus the 2020 halving price. This time, bitcoin fell about 49% from its October 2025 peak of roughly $126,198 to about $64,580 as of August 6, 2026 (CoinDesk), and that decline alone was enough to erase essentially the entire post-halving gain. Twenty-seven months after the halving, the price is back to about where it started.
Reporting on this decline points to a hawkish Fed, US-Iran tension, a 13-day, $4.4 billion streak of Bitcoin ETF outflows, and a surprise bitcoin sale by Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) as the drivers of the crash itself (Backpack Exchange). None of those four things are unique to bitcoin's four-year halving schedule. What is notable for this article is simpler: the size of the cushion above the halving price shrank every cycle, and this cycle, for the first time, the cushion is gone.
The halving-to-peak lag has now held for three cycles running, so dismissing it as coincidence gets harder each time. But "the halving predicts a rally" and "the rally is safe to hold" are two different claims, and the last three cycles keep answering them differently. In every cycle so far, the rally has fully reversed at some point after the peak. The only thing that changed this time is how much of it was left standing when the reversal caught up.
That is a volatility story, not a reason to expect any particular outcome next cycle. The next halving is not due until roughly 2028, and nothing here says what bitcoin does between now and then.
If you hold bitcoin, or are deciding whether to, the number that matters is not the halving date. It is how much of your own portfolio depends on where bitcoin happens to be sitting in its cycle right now. NetWort's Bitcoin asset page shows the full price history charted out, and the Explore screener lets you check volatility and drawdown across assets side by side, including how a swing like the one above would sit inside your own holdings. For how big a crypto allocation is worth carrying through cycles like this, see the crypto allocation percentage breakdown.