Bitcoin All-Time High

The ATH on this page is the highest daily close in Bitcoin’s merged USD price series, the same series every other chart on btc oak reads from. Daily closes are stable across data providers; intraday wicks are not. The often-cited “$20,000 December 2017” figure is an intraday wick on a single venue; the daily-close peak that month was around $19,665, and a close-space figure of that order propagates through every cycle-peak analysis here.

The distance-from-ATH cell at the top is computed against the most recent spot, refreshed a few times a day. The ATH only updates when a new daily close exceeds the previous high, which happens overnight in the pipeline. Days-since-ATH is wall-clock from the date the current ATH was set.

Each row is a true local maximum near a known cycle anchor. The table re-detects the peak from the price series rather than hard-coding it, so nightly refits don’t drift the values. The drawdown column is the lowest close between that peak and the next, or the absolute low if no higher close has yet printed. The recovery column is days from peak until the next close above it.

From the 2013 row down, the recovery column shortens. The 2013 close took just over three years to be surpassed; the 2017 close almost exactly three; the 2021 close about two years and four months. Each cycle so far has rebuilt to a higher close in less time than the one before. Whether the explanation is maturation (deeper liquidity recovers faster), institutional flow (spot ETFs absorb selling pressure that previously deepened the bear), or some combination, the column points one way.

The drawdown column reads the same way: each cycle bottom has been shallower than the last, from roughly −93% in 2011 to −77% in 2022, and the long-run average drawdown has compressed cycle-on-cycle. Drawdown from ATH shows the continuous shape that this table only samples.

Wicks vs closes. Where a higher figure shows up elsewhere — $69,000 for the 2021 peak, $20,000 for 2017 — that number is an intraday wick on a single venue. Daily closes are the more conservative and more comparable measure; they’re what this page uses. Either choice is defensible; the two will hand a careful reader different numbers.

Mt.Gox-era data is patchy. Bitcoin’s first cycle peak in 2011 happened on a single dominant venue, Mt.Gox — whose tape was later shown to have been manipulated by exchange-operated bots active mainly in 2013. Subsequent providers stitched together cleaner aggregate series, but the 2011–2013 portion of any Bitcoin price chart carries provider-specific divergences a few percent wide. The merged series here is the same one the rest of the site reads from; the figures shouldn’t be treated as audited.

Recovery times update slowly. The most recent ATH’s recovery cell will read “not yet” until a higher close prints. The penultimate row will retroactively update when its successor is broken; nothing else moves. A recent peak that hasn’t been broken yet may still be; the table won’t fill that cell until it happens.

Common searches around “bitcoin all-time high”, answered against the same data the rest of the page reads from.