Bitcoin Halving: How Four Reward Cuts Reshaped the Market

Roughly every four years, every 210,000 blocks mined, bitcoin's code automatically cuts the reward miners get for each new block in half. It's a built-in, protocol-level scarcity mechanism — the only way new coins ever enter circulation, and the core reason the total supply will never exceed 21 million. More on the mechanics in our glossary.

The first halving happened on November 28, 2012: the reward dropped from 50 to 25 BTC, with price around $12.35 a coin. The second came on July 9, 2016, cutting the reward from 25 to 12.5 BTC at a price near $650.53. The third landed on May 11, 2020, reducing the reward from 12.5 to 6.25 BTC at around $8,821.42. The fourth, and most recent, took place on April 20, 2024: the reward fell from 6.25 to 3.125 BTC at a price of about $64,994.44, according to CoinLedger.

A notable pattern: price never reacted to a halving instantly. After the first halving, it took bitcoin about a year to clear $1,000. After the second, the market didn't reach nearly $20,000 until late 2017 — a year and a half later. After the third halving in 2020, price didn't set a new all-time high above $69,000 until November 2021.

Put simply: cutting new supply doesn't push the price up overnight — a halving slows the rate at which new coins hit the market, but the price reaction has historically played out over months or years, and always against a backdrop of plenty of other factors, from macroeconomics to the broader market cycle.

An important caveat: four past cycles is a very small sample, not a law of nature. With each halving, bitcoin's market cap gets larger, meaning a comparable percentage price gain requires ever more fresh capital — what worked in 2012 or 2016, at a market cap thousands of times smaller than today's, isn't guaranteed to repeat in the same proportions going forward.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.