Bitcoin 4-year cycle chart: dates and where are we

How to read this chart

• Price line — Bitcoin’s daily closing price in USD, plotted on a logarithmic scale.
• Expansion window — the green band from each halving to that cycle’s peak close.
• Drawdown window — the red band from the peak to the bear-market bottom.
• Halving markers — dashed vertical lines at the 4 completed halvings, plus the projected fifth.
• You are here — it shows where we are along the 4-year Bitcoin cycle.
• Range buttons — switch between the full history and any single cycle.
• PNG — download the current chart view as an image.

The cycle windows are fixed boundaries derived from the same daily closing data the chart plots. Each expansion runs from a halving to that cycle’s peak close within the following 18 months, and each drawdown runs from that peak to the lowest close after it (the first cycle’s bottom excludes a brief February 2014 flash-crash print). The current drawdown’s end date is a projection: the October 2025 peak plus the average drawdown length of the 3 completed cycles, pointing to late October 2026. The red band ahead of the latest close marks expected territory, not recorded prices.

What the Bitcoin 4-year cycle is

The Bitcoin 4-year cycle is the market pattern that tracks the halving schedule. A halving is the protocol event that cuts the block subsidy (the new bitcoin issued with each block) in half every 210,000 blocks, roughly every 4 years. Four halvings have occurred: November 28, 2012, July 9, 2016, May 11, 2020, and April 20, 2024.

Around that fixed supply schedule, the market has repeated a loose choreography. Price rallied in the 12 to 18 months after each halving, peaked, then entered a drawdown of a year or more before settling into an accumulation range ahead of the next halving. Cycle theory reads this as cause and effect: each halving halves the flow of new supply, and price responds with a lag.

The chart plots the full daily price history on a logarithmic scale so every cycle stays readable at once. On a linear scale, the first epoch’s move from $12 to $1,238 would vanish next to the six-figure prices of the current one. The log scale gives each epoch’s percentage moves equal visual weight.

Bitcoin cycle history

Four complete halvings anchor the price history in the chart. The table shows each halving and the peak and bottom that followed, the same boundaries the chart’s expansion and drawdown windows mark.

The peak multiples shrink each cycle. The first cycle topped at roughly 100 times its halving-day price, the second at about 30 times, the third at about 8 times, and the current one has reached about 1.9 times so far. The third cycle also complicates the pattern: after its 2022 drawdown, price recovered to a new high of $73,118 in March 2024, weeks before the next halving.

The limits of the 4-year cycle thesis

The evidence base is 4 cycles. That is a small sample by any statistical standard, and each cycle unfolded in a different market: the first with almost no institutional access, the latest with spot Bitcoin ETFs absorbing supply and macro liquidity steering flows.

The halving’s direct supply effect keeps getting smaller. The 2024 halving cut new issuance by about 450 BTC per day, a flow that is minor next to the volume ETFs and exchanges move daily. As the asset grows, the mechanical case for halving-driven cycles weakens even if the pattern’s shape persists.

Treat the cycle as a lens, not a forecast. It organizes Bitcoin’s price history into readable chapters and shows where the current epoch stands. The halving dates are near certain; everything the market does around them is not.