Black Thursday: How Bitcoin Lost Half Its Value in a Day

On March 12, 2020 — a day the industry now calls "Black Thursday" — Bitcoin crashed from around $8,000 to $3,800 in under 24 hours, wiping out more than 50% of its market value. On BitMEX, the price slid from $7,939 to $4,346 (roughly -45%), CNBC reports.

The crash wasn't a crypto-only story: the Dow Jones fell 2,000 points that same day and tripped its circuit breaker twice, while the S&P 500 entered a technical bear market — over eight days, the US stock market lost $3 trillion in value amid escalating COVID-19 panic.

One especially dramatic episode that day: an outage at BitMEX, then the largest crypto derivatives exchange, which suddenly went down in the middle of the panic, preventing traders from closing positions and stopping their losses. By the time the exchange came back online, Bitcoin's price had fallen roughly another 30%. The crash triggered a cascade of forced liquidations on derivatives exchanges: as the price dropped below various positions' liquidation thresholds, those positions were automatically sold off, pushing the spot price down even further.

The upshot: Black Thursday showed clearly that under acute systemic stress, Bitcoin doesn't trade as an isolated, standalone asset class — it moves in sync with traditional markets, and infrastructure fragility at individual exchanges can amplify a crash far beyond its original trigger.

The recovery wasn't instant: by most estimates, it took Bitcoin roughly a month and a half to claw back toward pre-crash levels before beginning the long climb that eventually led to its all-time high in late 2021.

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