Glossary / Markets & investing
Bear market
Also known as Crypto winter.
- Definition
- Bear markets are the long stretches when bitcoin's price falls and stays down, and they are when the businesses holding other people's coins tend to break.
The pattern repeats: price falls by half or more, and then the lenders, exchanges and funds that looked solid at the top begin to fail. Celsius froze customer withdrawals on June 12, 2022, and FTX filed for bankruptcy that November. The chart eventually recovers, but only for holders whose coins sat somewhere that survived, so custody rather than conviction decides who is still there.
How it works
A bear market is a drawdown that lasts long enough to change behaviour, and in bitcoin it has always lasted longer than newcomers expect.
The mechanics are forced selling. Leveraged traders are liquidated first, within hours. Miners sell next, because their electricity bills are denominated in local currency and their revenue is not. Funds that promised redemptions sell whatever is liquid, which is usually bitcoin rather than the illiquid tokens that got them into trouble. Each wave supplies coins into a market with fewer bidders, which is why declines have historically overshot any reasonable estimate of fair value.
The durations are the part worth internalising. The decline from the late 2013 top ran into 2015. The 2018 slide took about a year to bottom and roughly three more to make a new high. The low print of 15,587 dollars arrived on November 21, 2022, ten days after FTX filed, and bitcoin did not pass 100,000 dollars until December 4, 2024. Following the October 2025 record, bitcoin was trading near half its peak by August 2026, with US spot funds shedding a combined 4.57 billion dollars across November and December 2025 alone.
"Crypto winter" is the same thing with a nicer name, usually applied when trading volumes and media attention fall away too.
Where you see it
The visible damage in a bear market lands on platforms, not on the protocol, and the pattern is dependably ugly.
Companies exit or fail. LocalBitcoins shut down in February 2023 after a decade of operation. Bittrex filed for Chapter 11 on May 8, 2023. Luno, still fully active across Africa and Southeast Asia, is closing its European business, with euro withdrawals ending on August 31, 2026. None of those events had anything to do with bitcoin's software; they were businesses running out of customers or capital.
Withdrawals get "paused". The phrasing is always the same and it always means the same thing: the coins you thought were yours were on a balance sheet, and the balance sheet is short. A pause almost never reverses.
Fees fall. Block space is cheap when nobody is transacting, so a bear market is the least expensive time to consolidate outputs or move coins to a hardware wallet. This is the one genuinely good news item in the list.
And the safest response is boring. Coins in your own custody do not care what the price is, cannot be lent out behind your back, and cannot be frozen by a company you have never met.
Bear market vs bull market
A bull market and a bear market are the same market seen from opposite ends, but they punish different mistakes. In a rally, the expensive error is chasing: overpaying, over-sizing, and moving money to whichever platform advertised hardest. In a decline, the expensive error is trusting: leaving coins with a yield product, an exchange under stress, or a lender promising returns that only worked while prices rose. Notice also that the two are only cleanly separable afterwards. Every bear market contains sharp rallies, and every bull market contains falls of 30 percent that felt terminal at the time.