Bitcoin Is 32% Below the $126,000 Record It Set a Year Ago

A year to the day after bitcoin set its record high, it trades about a third below it. CoinDesk marked the anniversary early on Tuesday with the price at $85,453 and the drawdown at 32% from the $126,000 peak of 6 October 2025. Crypto Briefing, publishing the same day, put the price at roughly $85,300 and the gap at about the same 32%. CoinDesk's own ticker read $86,026 when the page was pulled again late in the morning. Only the percentage holds steady across the accounts; the price is a moving mark, and each figure carries its own hour.

Who was buying this leg

The explanation both accounts reach for is the composition of the buyers. Spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds, the regulated wrappers that hold the asset for investors who never touch a wallet, began trading in the United States in early 2024, and the rally that followed ran on allocation money instead of retail margin. Tim Sun, a senior researcher at HashKey Group, told CoinDesk that buyers in this cycle increasingly come from outside the crypto market, naming ETFs, asset managers, family offices and corporations. Griffin Ardern, co-founder and vol desk portfolio manager at Primal Fund, described the mechanics of that money to the same outlet.

"ETF allocation money rebalances to target weights — it buys weakness by construction," Ardern said.

Ardern put the pace at nine months to grind out a 53% decline, against a few months of cascading liquidations taking earlier cycles down 80%. Jeff Anderson, head of US at the market-making firm STS Digital, told CoinDesk the same thing from the other end: as more participants arrive, realised volatility falls, and that means shallower declines and lower peaks. Sun put current annualised volatility near 40% against long-run levels above 80%. Neither volatility figure appears in any second account read here. Spot ETF demand has been running at billions a month through the autumn.

Where the low sat

The two accounts do not agree on the bottom. CoinDesk dates it to 30 June, just below $59,000, and puts the fall from the peak at more than 53%. Crypto Briefing places it in late June or early July, gives a band of roughly $58,000 to $60,000, and counts a rebound of about 45% by late September. The date and the level both differ, and we could not establish which reading supersedes the other. What the two share is the shape, an early trough and a quick recovery off it.

The cycle comparison rests on one account

CoinDesk's sharpest claim is the historical one, and it is the claim nothing else read here corroborates. By its own calculations, bitcoin was down 69.7% a year after the 2013 peak and 82.3% a year after the December 2017 top. The 2021 cycle gave 74.6%. Past bear markets took prices 77% to 85% off their records, on the same reckoning. Crypto Briefing offers no equivalent table. It stands unverified. CoinDesk also attributes the missing leverage to 10 October last year, when a macro-driven sell-off triggered more than $19 billion in liquidations across crypto derivatives, and that figure is its alone as well. Bitcoin has since stalled twice at the $87,000 level without clearing it.

What the long end decides

Ardern's caution is about positioning, not direction. Implied volatility is near its lowest percentile on record and one-year options skew is neutral to bearish, which he reads as a market that has bought the shallow story without paying for upside. He also said the moment that story is loudest is usually when downside protection is cheapest. His test for the next leg is the long end of the US Treasury market, where the 30-year yield recently touched 5.7% and has risen more than 80 basis points this year. A failure there, on his reading, would end the shallow pattern. Crypto Briefing looks at the same drawdown and says recoveries of this size have historically run 28 to 38 months. Nine months in, the two accounts point opposite ways, and neither addresses the other.