Historical replay · BTC/USD
The "Black Thursday" Crash (March 2020)
On March 12-13, 2020, as global markets crashed amid COVID-19 panic, Bitcoin lost nearly half its value in under 24 hours — one of the fastest drops ever recorded. Relive hour by hour how the panic unfolded.
On March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic. Over the following 48 hours, financial markets worldwide entered a phase of indiscriminate selling: US stock exchanges triggered circuit breakers multiple times, automatically halting trading, and even traditional "safe-haven" assets like gold were sold off alongside everything else.
Bitcoin was no exception: on March 12 it lost nearly 40% in a single day, continuing to fall to a low near $3,800 — almost half its value from just hours earlier. Part of the violence of the drop was amplified by a technical outage on the BitMEX derivatives platform, which several analysts believe prevented orderly liquidation and contributed to a cascade of forced selling.
The mechanism behind this kind of crash is called a "liquidity crisis": when panic is severe enough, investors sell whatever they can to raise cash and cover margin calls, regardless of an asset's underlying quality. In hindsight, March 12-13, 2020 turned out to be a historic bottom — over the following months, fueled by unprecedented monetary stimulus, Bitcoin began one of the longest rallies in its history.