The Oct. 10, 2025, crypto market crash wiped out an unprecedented $19 billion worth of leveraged Bitcoin and other crypto positions. But it was far from one of the biggest percentage drops in the price of BTC on record.
From Mt. Gox’s penny trade to the FTX collapse shock, here’s every time Bitcoin’s price crashed hard—and the circumstances that triggered it.
This is the big one. Bitcoin dropped approximately 99.9% on Mt. Gox after a hacker stole hundreds of thousands worth of BTC and sold it for just a penny. At the time, Mt. Gox facilitated roughly 90% of all Bitcoin trading. Because Mt. Gox dominated Bitcoin trading at the time, the exchange’s internal collapse briefly erased nearly the entire market’s value.
(Mt. Gox was the most dominant, but not the first, Bitcoin exchange, according to Guiness World Records. That title belongs to BitcoinMarket.)
The Mt. Gox hack actually occurred on June 15, 2011, but wasn’t disclosed until a few days later. A Mt. Gox auditor account was compromised and used to steal 740,000 BTC from customers and 100,000 from the company itself. When the exploiter dumped the BTC, the price plummeted to just pennies.
At the time, that amount of Bitcoin would have been worth about $460,000. At current prices, 840,000 Bitcoin would be worth just shy of $94 billion. That’s equivalent to the entire BTC treasuries of Michael Saylor’s Strategy, Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings, Jack Maller’s XXI, Japan BTC juggernaut Metaplanet, Adam Back’s Bitcoin Standard Treasury Co., and newly public Bullish.
Bitcoin dove from $265 to $150, losing about 43%, in April 2013 thanks to what Mt. Gox would later call distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attacks. A DDoS attack overwhelms a target URL with external requests to stop it from being accessed by legitimate users.
The attack meant that trading on Mt. Gox kept freezing amid record traffic and prompted a sharp sell-off.
Mt. Gox said at the time the attacks had become frustratingly common. “Attackers wait until the price of Bitcoins reaches a certain value, sell, destabilize the exchange, wait for everybody to panic-sell their Bitcoins, wait for the price to drop to a certain amount, then stop the attack and start buying as much as they can. Repeat this two or three times like we saw over the past few days and they profit,” the exchange wrote at the time, according to TechCrunch citing a now-deleted Facebook post.
In December 2013, the People’s Bank of China made it clear they did not want banks touching Bitcoin because it was not backed by any nation or central authority.
Bitcoin had been experiencing a rapid rise. In late November, Bitcoin had climbed above $1,000 for the first time. On Dec. 5, Bitcoin had risen above $1,200. But two days later, it slipped about 50% to below $600 as investors digested the impact of China’s banking ban.
This is around the time that former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan had started publicly deriding Bitcoin as “a bubble.”
“You have to really stretch your imagination to infer what the intrinsic value of Bitcoin is,” he said during an interview with Bloomberg. “I haven’t been able to do it. Maybe somebody else can.”
China Classifies Crypto Transactions as Money Laundering in Update to AML Law
In early September 2017, China outlawed initial coin offerings (ICOs), calling them an “illegal” form of fundraising.
At first, markets brushed it off, viewing the move as a crackdown on tokens rather than Bitcoin itself. But panic set in a week later when reports emerged that Beijing would also force domestic exchanges to close. As BTCC, Huobi, and OKCoin confirmed their shutdowns on September 14 and 15, Bitcoin plunged about 25% in two days—from roughly $4,400 to $3,300.
The selloff marked the end of China’s dominance in crypto trading and shifted global liquidity to Japan and Korea.
By late 2017, Bitcoin had been on a tear and was nearing the $20,000 mark for the first time in its history.
Then Bitcoin futures hitting regulated exchanges and too-hot sentiment created a drop that saw BTC fall from about $16,500 on Dec. 22 to about $11,000 the next day. In 24 hours, Bitcoin lost roughly one-third of its value, 33.3%, marking the beginning of a year-long bear market.
Chicago Board Options Futures Exchange (CBOE) and Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) had just launched cash-settled Bitcoin futures contracts.
Bitcoin’s $19 Billion Leverage Wipeout Leaves Market in Reset Mode
It’s not that there weren’t already crypto native Bitcoin derivatives exchanges—Deribit, BitMEX, and Kraken were all active at the time. But the crypto native firms were offshore or unregulated then. The Wall Street suits preferred to use venues that already had licenses from the Commodities Futures Trading Commission.
Months later, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco published a report blaming the introduction of futures for the December…