A record high is the number most people use to judge where a market stands. It is the peak behind every "down a third from the top" headline, the price at which the last buyers of a boom finally break even, and, for a trader, the level above which there is no earlier trading to lean on.
On September 21, 2026, bitcoin rose above $87,000 on major exchanges, its highest price since late January, and CNBC still described it as well off its record (source: CNBC) (source: CoinDesk live blog). That record dates from October 2025, and nearly a year later the price was still close to a third below it.
Look the record up on three websites and you can get three different numbers, sometimes on three different dates. One site shows $126,223, another shows $124,720, and a third shows something in between. Each number is correct for what it measures, and once you know which kind of price you are looking at, the differences make sense.
What is bitcoin's all-time high?
Bitcoin's all-time high (ATH) is $126,223, reached during US trading hours on October 6, 2025 (source: CoinDesk). Its highest daily price is $124,720.09, which FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data) dates October 5, 2025 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Bitcoin has set no new record in 2026.
The first figure is an intraday high: the single highest price bitcoin traded at during the day. The second is one price taken at the same time each day, which is what most long-run price charts and history tables use. The main figures, each with its date:
Measure | Price | Date | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
Intraday record | $126,223 | October 6, 2025 | CoinDesk |
Highest price on BloFin's BTCUSDT Perpetual | 126,188.5 USDT | October 6, 2025 (UTC day) | BloFin |
Record daily price (Coinbase series on FRED) | $124,720.09 | October 5, 2025 (FRED's date) | FRED |
Lowest daily price of 2026 so far | $58,585.96 | June 30, 2026 | FRED |
Latest daily price | $84,553.91 | September 27, 2026 | FRED |
BloFin's own record sits within about $35 of CoinDesk's. The BTCUSDT Perpetual is a bitcoin futures contract with no expiry date, priced in USDT, a stablecoin issued by Tether that tracks the US dollar. It peaked at 126,188.5 USDT on its October 6, 2025 daily candle (source: BloFin, BTCUSDT Perpetual).
Why do sites show different bitcoin all-time highs?
Bitcoin trades around the clock on many exchanges, so it has no single official closing price the way a listed stock does. Every "all-time high" you read is somebody's choice about three things: whether to use the day's highest trade or one daily price, which date each price is filed under, and which exchanges count.
Intraday high or daily price
An intraday high may have lasted only seconds, while a daily price is usually taken when that source's day ends. Both are real prices, but a daily price will almost always sit below the intraday high, because bitcoin rarely closes the day at the exact top of its range. That is why the record daily price, $124,720.09, is about $1,500 lower than the intraday record of $126,223.
Which day the record is filed under
The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis publishes Coinbase's bitcoin price in its FRED database as one value per day, and FRED files its highest value, $124,720.09, under October 5, 2025 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The intraday record came a day later, on October 6. The price behind that FRED value sits close to the end of October 6 on an exchange chart: BloFin's BTCUSDT Perpetual closed its October 6 day, counted in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), at 124,632.9 USDT, within about $90 of it (source: BloFin, BTCUSDT Perpetual). Around the October 2025 record, FRED's date labels ran about one day behind the moment each price was taken, so a history built on FRED shows the record a day earlier than one built on exchange candles.
Dates can differ at the lows too. FRED's lowest value of 2026 is filed under June 30, while BloFin's lowest daily low, 57,775.9 USDT, falls on July 1 on a UTC chart. The two measure different things: FRED takes one reading per day, and a daily low is the lowest trade of that day.
One exchange or many
Each exchange has its own buyers and sellers, so each has its own highest trade. The gaps stay small, because traders buy on the cheaper exchange and sell on the more expensive one until the prices line up; CoinDesk's record and BloFin's differ by about $35. A price page that averages many exchanges shows yet another figure.
When you quote bitcoin's record, say which kind you mean. Both of these are accurate, and a reader can check each one: "an intraday high of $126,223 on October 6, 2025" and "a record daily price of $124,720.09, which FRED dates October 5, 2025".
How far is bitcoin from its all-time high?
Bitcoin's latest daily price on FRED is $84,553.91, for September 27, 2026, which is 32.2% below its record daily price of $124,720.09 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Measured against the intraday record of $126,223, the gap is 33.0%. Both figures move every day, so check the date on any "below its high" number you read.
You can work the distance out yourself with two numbers. Take the record, subtract today's price, and divide by the record:
(124,720.09 − 84,553.91) ÷ 124,720.09 = 0.322, or 32.2% below the high.
The trip back up is bigger than the fall, because the rise is measured from a lower starting point. Divide the record by today's price and subtract one:
124,720.09 ÷ 84,553.91 − 1 = 0.475, or a 47.5% rise to get back to the record.
A 32% fall needing a 47.5% rise to recover is arithmetic, and it holds for any asset. It says nothing about whether or when bitcoin gets there.
What happened after the October 2025 record
Four days after the record, on October 10, 2025, more than $19 billion of leveraged crypto positions were closed by force within 24 hours. CoinDesk called it the largest such event on record, citing CoinGlass data for the $19 billion (source: CoinDesk Research). That $19 billion is the face value of the positions that were closed. In a Cryptonews story republished by Yahoo Finance, one analyst put the money traders actually lost at 5% to 15% of it, and another at $1 billion to several billion (source: Cryptonews via Yahoo Finance). On BloFin's BTCUSDT Perpetual, the October 10 daily candle ran from a high of 122,466.7 USDT to a low of 101,487.7 USDT, a range of 17.1% in one day (source: BloFin, BTCUSDT Perpetual).
From there the price slid into 2026. FRED's daily price reached $63,845.99 on February 5, then fell again in June, when bitcoin lost about 20%, its worst month since June 2022 (source: CoinDesk). The low came on June 30 at $58,585.96, 53.0% below the record (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). In early June, CNBC reported that uncertainty around the Iran war had kept bitcoin under pressure for months. The same report said a 13-day run of outflows from US spot bitcoin funds, their longest ever, had just ended on June 4 (source: CNBC). War risk and fund outflows are two of the usual reasons why bitcoin goes down.
The recovery since June 30 has been sharp. The daily price has since risen 44.3% from that low (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), and on September 23 CoinDesk reported that bitcoin was on track for its first July-to-September winning streak since 2012 (source: CoinDesk). A bond-market move and a wave of short squeezes were among the reasons why bitcoin was going up in August and September.
Bitcoin all-time high history
Bitcoin has set a string of records since 2011, climbing from about $30 to more than $126,000, and a deep fall has followed almost every one. Its all-time high of roughly $30 in June 2011 gave way to a fall of more than 92% by that November (source: CNBC).
The 2013 peak above $1,000 was followed by an 84% slide over the next two years (source: CNBC). Those early figures are approximate, because FRED's Coinbase series only starts in December 2014; from 2017 on, each fall is measured from FRED's record daily price to the lowest daily price that followed.
Record | Intraday high | Record daily price (FRED) | Later low (daily price) | Fall | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
June 2011 | roughly $30 | n/a | below $2.50 by November 2011 | more than 92% | CNBC |
Late 2013 | above $1,000 | n/a | below $200 two years later | 84% | CNBC |
December 2017 | almost $20,000 | $19,650.01, Dec 16, 2017 | $3,183.00, Dec 15, 2018 | 83.8% | CNBC; FRED |
April 2021 | n/a | $63,660.94, Apr 13, 2021 | $29,788.61, Jul 20, 2021 | 53.2% | FRED |
November 2021 | n/a | $67,510.06, Nov 8, 2021 | $15,755.75, Nov 21, 2022 | 76.7% | FRED |
March 2024 | $73,798, Mar 14 | $73,098.48, Mar 13, 2024 | $53,930.39, Sep 6, 2024 | 26.2% | CoinDesk; FRED |
January 2025 | $109,350.72, Jan 20 | $106,159.26, Jan 20, 2025 | $76,251.64, Apr 7, 2025 | 28.2% | CNBC; FRED |
August 2025 | above $124,000, Aug 14 | $123,365.63, Aug 12, 2025 | $108,247.95, Aug 30, 2025 | 12.3% | CoinDesk; FRED |
October 2025 | $126,223, Oct 6 | $124,720.09, Oct 5, 2025 | $58,585.96, Jun 30, 2026 | 53.0% | CoinDesk; FRED |
Two patterns stand out in the history. The falls after the 2017 and November 2021 peaks were the deepest, at 83.8% and 76.7%, while the falls after the March 2024 and January 2025 records were far shallower, at 26.2% and 28.2%. The fall after October 2025, 53.0%, sits between the two groups. Some records also came in pairs: April and November 2021 were separate peaks in one cycle, and the January 20, 2025 daily price beat the December 16, 2024 one by only $22.27.
What was in the news around each record
Each record arrived alongside news that traders were watching, and the reports from the time describe it without claiming a single cause.
March 2024: bitcoin touched a record of $73,798 on March 14 (source: CoinDesk), and CNBC named the launch of US spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that January as an important contributor to the rally (source: CNBC). Money moving into those funds can turn into bitcoin buying, as bitcoin ETF flows explained shows with daily data.
December 2024: bitcoin passed $100,000 for the first time on the evening of December 4 in New York, reaching $103,844.05. CNBC reported that it happened on the same day President-elect Donald Trump announced his pick to chair the Securities and Exchange Commission (source: CNBC).
January 2025: the price reached $109,350.72 overnight into inauguration day, January 20, then pulled back to trade more than 2% lower on the day, at $103,558.38 (source: CNBC).
July and August 2025: the record above $123,000 on July 14 came as US lawmakers began what they called "Crypto Week", with strong ETF inflows in the days before (source: CNBC). On August 14 bitcoin passed $124,000 in early Asian trading, on a day when the S&P 500 had just logged a second straight record close (source: CoinDesk).
October 2025: in the week to October 3, US spot bitcoin ETFs took in a net $3.2 billion, their second-largest weekly inflow on record, while a US government shutdown was under way (source: CoinDesk).
Bitcoin's all-time high adjusted for inflation and in gold
A dollar in 2025 bought less than a dollar in 2020, so a record measured in dollars flatters later years, a point that runs through the debate over bitcoin and inflation. Alex Thorn of Galaxy Digital calculated that bitcoin's 2025 peak was $99,848 when measured in 2020 prices, after US inflation of about 24% between those years (source: CoinDesk).
Priced in gold, the benchmark in any bitcoin versus gold comparison, bitcoin sits even further from its record. On September 21, 2026, one bitcoin bought 19.8 ounces of gold, up from a low of 12 ounces in February but about half its record of just over 40 ounces (source: CoinDesk live blog).
How to check bitcoin's all-time high yourself
You can check bitcoin's all-time high yourself in a few minutes with free tools: a public price series, a price page and an exchange chart. The work is in matching the kind of number, because an intraday high and a daily price for the same day can differ by more than $1,000.
Open FRED's Coinbase bitcoin price series. Set the chart to its full range and hover over the top. FRED shows the highest daily price, $124,720.09 on October 5, 2025, and you can download the whole history as a spreadsheet (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
Open a price page with an "all-time high" field. Check whether it averages many exchanges and which time zone it uses for its days. That explains most of the gap between its figure and FRED's.
Open a chart on an exchange you use. On the BTC/USDT Spot trading page or the BTCUSDT Perpetual page on BloFin, switch the chart to daily or weekly candles and look for the tallest wick. The wick is the thin line above a candle's body that marks the highest trade, so each candle's high is an intraday high.
Match the kind before you compare. Compare an intraday high with another intraday high, and a daily price with another daily price. Mixing them makes the record look as if it moved when it did not.
What an all-time high means for traders
At a new record, every holder is in profit, so there is no group of earlier buyers waiting to sell at their break-even price. Traders call this price discovery: the market has no past trading at those levels to lean on, and the price can move fast in either direction.
Leverage tends to build up near a record, and it can turn a normal pullback into a sharp one. When many traders hold leveraged long positions, a fall forces some of them to be closed out, and those forced sales push the price lower again. October 10, 2025 is the worked case. Say you had opened a 10x long position at that day's high of 122,466.7 USDT on BloFin's BTCUSDT Perpetual. At 10x, a 10% fall wipes out the margin you put up, and the exchange closes the position before that point to cover the loss. The price fell 17.1% from high to low that day, so your position would have been liquidated long before the bottom. Before you open a leveraged trade near a record, read what sets your liquidation price.
One check that shows how crowded long positions are is the funding rate, the regular payment between long and short holders on a perpetual contract. When it stays high for days, longs are paying heavily to keep their positions open (source: BloFin Academy, crypto funding rates). A record set on high funding has more leverage underneath it than one set on low funding.
If you would rather follow an experienced trader than time a record yourself, BloFin lets you copy BTCUSDT positions from lead traders and set your own limits on size and leverage. A copied trade follows the lead trader in and out, including through a sharp fall after a record, which is why how copying a futures trader works is worth reading first.
Looking to trade BTC? To get started, you'll need to first create a BloFin account, fund your account with cryptocurrency, and navigate to the BTC/USDT Spot trading page, BTC/USDC Spot trading page, BTCUSDT Perpetual page or BTCUSD Perpetual page, or browse the lead traders you can copy on BTC.
Frequently asked questions
How many times did bitcoin hit a new all-time high in 2025?
On FRED's Coinbase series, bitcoin's daily price set a new record on 14 days in 2025, from January 20 to October 5, after 26 record days in 2024 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The records came in bursts: one in January, four in May, five in July, two in August and two in early October, with weeks between them when the price stayed below its high.
When did bitcoin first reach $100,000?
Bitcoin first traded above $100,000 on the evening of December 4, 2024, New York time, which was already December 5 in UTC, and reached $103,844.05 that night (source: CNBC). FRED's first daily price above $100,000 came on December 7, 2024, at $101,174.99, because the December 5 and 6 readings fell just short (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
What is bitcoin's all-time low?
Bitcoin's lowest price depends on where a price record starts, and many long-run series begin years after bitcoin first traded. FRED's Coinbase series, for example, begins in December 2014 at $370 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Earlier prices were far lower: after reaching roughly $30 in June 2011, bitcoin was back below $2.50 by November of that year (source: CNBC).
Has bitcoin hit a new all-time high in 2026?
Bitcoin has set no new record in 2026. Its highest daily price of the year on FRED is $96,852.91 on January 14, about 22% below the record, and its lowest is $58,585.96 on June 30 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). The September 21 rally took bitcoin above $87,000, its highest price since late January (source: CNBC) (source: CoinDesk live blog).
How long has bitcoin taken to beat an old record?
The wait has varied widely. FRED's daily price took until November 30, 2020 to pass the December 2017 peak, almost three years, and until March 4, 2024 to pass the November 2021 peak, about 28 months. The March 2024 record fell within eight months, on November 5, 2024 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Those gaps describe the past and set no date for the next record.
Researched and written by the BloFin Academy editorial team with AI-assisted drafting. All facts independently verified. Primary sources include FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), CoinDesk, CNBC, Yahoo Finance and BloFin, current as of September 28, 2026.
Nothing in this article constitutes financial advice, and nothing in it is a recommendation to buy, sell or hold bitcoin in any form. Bitcoin has fallen by more than half after several past records, and a leveraged position opened near a high can be liquidated in a single day's pullback, losing all the margin assigned to it. BloFin services are not available in restricted locations, including the United States. Past performance does not indicate future results. Do your own research and consider your risk tolerance before you trade on BloFin.