Bitcoin has spent most of the past year trying to recover. After setting a record near $126,000 in October 2025, it fell for most of the next eight months, and by June 30, 2026 it was trading near $58,600, less than half its peak (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). It has since climbed back above $85,000, and traders who sat through the fall want to know whether the rebound marks a new uptrend or just another bounce. Many of them look for the answer in the moving averages on a price chart, and in the crossovers between them that headlines call golden and death crosses.
On October 5, 2026, CoinDesk reported that bitcoin's 50-, 100- and 200-day moving averages were one crossover away from lining up in bullish order for the first time since June 2025 (source: CoinDesk). The next day they did: on FRED's daily prices the 100-day average rose above the 200-day on October 6, 2026, and the three averages now sit in bullish order (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). That setup is easy to confuse with a golden cross, one of the most widely watched chart signals.
Bitcoin's classic golden cross already happened a month earlier. On the daily prices published by FRED, the economic database of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the 50-day average crossed above the 200-day average on September 8, 2026, and by October 6 the price had risen about 9% (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Knowing which cross people mean, and what past crosses were worth, helps you read the next headline calmly.
What is a bitcoin golden cross?
A bitcoin golden cross is a chart signal that appears when a shorter moving average of bitcoin's price crosses above a longer one, most often the 50-day average above the 200-day average. Traders read it as a sign that the trend has turned up, but it comes late, because both averages are built from past prices.
A moving average is the average closing price over a set number of days, so a 200-day simple moving average adds up the last 200 daily closes and divides by 200 (source: StockCharts). Each day the oldest price drops out and the newest one comes in, which smooths out the daily noise. The longer the average, the slower it reacts. That is why a cross of two averages tends to arrive after a price move has already started, and StockCharts warns that crossover signals come relatively late and give many false signals when prices move sideways. Exponential averages, which weight recent days more heavily, are the other common type, and moving averages in crypto compares the two.
Investopedia names the 50-day and 200-day pair as the most common choice, and notes that some traders use weeks or months instead of days (source: Investopedia). There is no single official version of the signal, which matters a great deal for bitcoin right now.
Has bitcoin had a golden cross in 2026?
Bitcoin had its classic golden cross in September 2026. On FRED's daily Coinbase prices, the 50-day simple moving average rose above the 200-day on September 8, and the exponential version followed on September 12 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). It was the first golden cross since May 2025, and it ended the death cross of November 2025.
Bitcoin closed at $78,548.91 on the day of the simple-average cross, after almost ten months in which the 50-day average had sat below the 200-day (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
News sites saw it coming. On September 10, Decrypt reported that bitcoin's 50-day exponential average was close to crossing its 200-day exponential average and expected the cross within a couple of days (source: Decrypt).
The October headlines are about a different pair. On October 4, bitcoin's 100-day simple average was $71,263.55 and its 200-day was $71,486.09, a gap of just 0.31%, and the gap had narrowed every day for a week. The 100-day crossed on October 6, at $71,783.43 against $71,640.59, so the three averages now sit in bullish order: the 50-day on top, the 100-day in the middle and the 200-day at the bottom (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Some traders would call that a golden cross of the 100-day and 200-day. CoinDesk calls it a full bullish alignment. You can add the same three averages to the daily chart of BloFin's BTCUSDT Perpetual from its indicators menu.
Why sites give different golden cross dates
Two websites can report the same golden cross on different days for three reasons. The first is the type of average, since exponential averages react faster than simple ones and cross earlier on a rising market. The second is the price feed, because each exchange or data provider records slightly different daily closes. The third is where a day ends, which differs between data sets that close at midnight UTC and those that take the price in US hours.
January 2022 shows how far apart the dates can be. Cointelegraph reported a bitcoin death cross on January 8, 2022 using exponential averages (source: Cointelegraph), while the simple-average version did not arrive until January 15 on FRED's prices. Both were correct for the averages they used. When you read about a cross, check which averages and which time frame the chart shows before you compare it with anything else.
What is a bitcoin death cross?
A bitcoin death cross is the mirror image of a golden cross: the 50-day moving average falls below the 200-day moving average. It sounds alarming, yet Investopedia points out that a death cross does not guarantee a bear market and often follows a big fall that has already happened (source: Investopedia).
Bitcoin's most recent death cross came in November 2025. News reports dated it November 16, about six weeks after bitcoin's record high near $126,000, and FRED's prices date it November 15 (source: 24/7 Wall St.). The same report noted that the three death crosses before it, in September 2023, August 2024 and April 2025, all came close to local lows. This time the fall continued: from the November 15 close of $95,095.36, bitcoin's daily price dropped to $58,585.96 by June 30, 2026, a further 38.4%, as the history of bitcoin's all-time high shows.
Every bitcoin golden and death cross since 2015
Bitcoin has had 10 golden crosses and 10 death crosses of its 50-day and 200-day simple moving averages since 2015, on the daily Coinbase prices that FRED publishes. The worst year after a golden cross followed September 2021, with a 59.1% fall (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
Date of cross | Type | Change 90 days later | Change 1 year later |
|---|---|---|---|
September 14, 2015 | Death cross | +87.8% | +163.5% |
October 28, 2015 | Golden cross | +28.8% | +127.3% |
March 30, 2018 | Death cross | −14.5% | −40.2% |
April 23, 2019 | Golden cross | +86.2% | +29.1% |
October 26, 2019 | Death cross | −9.2% | +40.6% |
February 18, 2020 | Golden cross | −4.5% | +412.9% |
March 26, 2020 | Death cross | +37.1% | +716.8% |
May 21, 2020 | Golden cross | +30.2% | +314.0% |
June 19, 2021 | Death cross | +33.4% | −42.2% |
September 15, 2021 | Golden cross | +0.5% | −59.1% |
January 15, 2022 | Death cross | −5.8% | −51.6% |
February 7, 2023 | Golden cross | +19.0% | +90.9% |
September 12, 2023 | Death cross | +59.4% | +124.9% |
October 30, 2023 | Golden cross | +21.8% | +109.7% |
August 10, 2024 | Death cross | +25.9% | +94.8% |
October 27, 2024 | Golden cross | +46.7% | +61.5% |
April 6, 2025 | Death cross | +38.0% | −12.9% |
May 21, 2025 | Golden cross | +2.3% | −30.7% |
November 15, 2025 | Death cross | −27.5% | Not yet known |
September 8, 2026 | Golden cross | Not yet known | Not yet known |
FRED takes each daily price at 5PM Pacific (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis), and each change is measured from the closing price on the day of the cross. The averages count only the days FRED publishes a price, so the first full 200-day average, and the start of this list, falls in late July 2015. Charts built on exchange prices can put a cross a day or two away from these dates.
Three golden crosses stand out as warnings. The September 2021 cross came about two months before bitcoin's November 2021 peak, and a year later the price was 59.1% lower. The May 2025 cross was followed by bitcoin's record high that October, yet a year after the cross the price was 30.7% lower. The February 2020 golden cross was followed within weeks by the March 2020 crash, which Cointelegraph described as a 62% price crash (source: Cointelegraph).
Does the golden cross work for bitcoin?
The golden cross has been followed by gains more often than not, but much of that comes from bitcoin's long rise rather than from the signal. Bitcoin was higher 90 days after 8 of its 9 completed golden crosses since 2015, compared with about 60% of all days in the same period (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
The one-year record is less impressive. Bitcoin was higher a year after 7 of 9 golden crosses, or 78%, while on any random day from mid-2015 onward it was higher a year later 71.4% of the time. Death crosses did worse but still came out ahead more often than not, with bitcoin higher a year later after 5 of 9. The March 2020 death cross, which struck in the middle of the pandemic crash, was followed by a 716.8% gain over the next year.
Nine or ten examples are far too few to call any of these differences reliable, and one or two different years would change the percentages a lot. Research on crypto trading rules gives a mixed answer. A peer-reviewed study of eleven cryptocurrencies from 2016 to 2018 found that only a short 20-day moving-average rule made statistically significant profits across all its samples (source: Grobys, Ahmed and Sapkota, Finance Research Letters). Bitcoin on its own showed significant profits with every average the study tested, up to 200 days, although the evidence weakened as the average got longer. The study compares the price with a single average rather than testing the 50-day and 200-day cross.
Stock markets show a similar pattern. FactSet studied crosses in US companies worth at least $300 million from 1998 to 2018. It found that death crosses were also followed by positive returns, and even beat golden crosses during the bull market of its sample period (source: FactSet). A golden cross is best read as a description of a trend that has already started.
What a full 50-, 100- and 200-day alignment means
A full bullish alignment is when the 50-day average sits above the 100-day, and the 100-day sits above the 200-day. It means bitcoin's short, medium and long-term averages are all pointing the same way, which is the setup CoinDesk described on October 5 and which completed the next day.
Past alignments have been mixed. On FRED's prices, the alignment that formed on October 27, 2020 lasted 209 days, and bitcoin rose 182.7% before it broke. The one that began on November 6, 2023 lasted 205 days, with a gain of 92.7% (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Others faded fast: the June 2024 alignment lasted 20 days and ended with bitcoin 10.5% lower, and the June 2025 alignment lasted 97 days for a gain of only 7.7%. Bitcoin's current alignment formed on October 6, 2026, its first since June 2025 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). An alignment tells you the trend is up today, while the length of the run has varied from three weeks to more than a year. You can watch this month's setup on the BTCUSDT Perpetual daily chart, where each close shows against the three averages; spot versus perpetual futures sets out how that contract differs from holding the coin.
How to trade a golden cross
A golden cross is most useful as a check on a trade you already have a reason to take, never as the only reason. By the time the averages cross, the price has usually moved a long way from its low, so the signal says more about where your stop should go than about when to buy.
On October 6, 2026, bitcoin's 200-day average sat 16.2% below its price and its 50-day average 6.5% below it (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
Those gaps matter when you decide where your stop loss goes. Some traders place a stop below the 200-day average, on the idea that the trend has failed if the price falls through it. Say you have 1,000 USDT and will lose no more than 2%, or 20 USDT, on one trade. A stop just under the 200-day average was about 16.2% below the price on October 6, so your position could be no bigger than about 123 USDT, because 16.2% of 123 is 20. A stop under the 50-day average, about 6.5% away, would allow a position of about 306 USDT for the same 20 USDT risk. The wider stop gives the trade more room, and the price of that room is a smaller position.
If you trade the perpetual with leverage, remember that a sharp pullback after a bullish signal can close a leveraged position before the trend resumes, as how your liquidation price is set explains. The bitcoin price can fall hard even while the averages still point up, which is the story of why bitcoin is dropping in many past pullbacks.
If you would rather not time crosses yourself, BloFin lets you copy BTCUSDT Perpetual positions from lead traders and set your own limits on size and leverage. A copied position follows the lead trader in and out, so read how copying a futures trader works before you start.
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
Is a golden cross bullish for bitcoin?
A golden cross confirms that bitcoin's recent prices have climbed above their longer-run average, so it describes an uptrend that has already begun. Over the following month it has been a weak guide. Since 2015, bitcoin was higher a month later after 6 of 9 completed golden crosses, against 58% of all days, and 39.0% lower after the February 2020 cross (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
When was bitcoin's last death cross?
Bitcoin's last death cross came on November 15, 2025, on FRED's daily prices, and the 50-day average stayed below the 200-day until September 8, 2026. That made it the third-longest death cross since 2015: only those of March 2018 and January 2022 lasted longer, each just over a year (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
What is the difference between a golden cross and a death cross?
Both signals use the same two moving averages and differ only in direction: in a golden cross the shorter average rises above the longer one, and in a death cross it falls below. Bitcoin has spent more time on the golden-cross side, with its 50-day average above the 200-day on about 62% of days since July 2015 (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
Can you see a golden cross on the weekly chart?
Yes. On a weekly chart the averages are counted in weeks, so a 50-week average covers about 350 days of prices and a 200-week average almost four years. That makes a weekly golden cross far slower and rarer than the daily one, and its dates will differ from the daily crosses that news sites usually report.
How long does a bitcoin golden cross last?
On FRED's prices, the time between a bitcoin golden cross and the next death cross has ranged from about five weeks to almost two and a half years. The shortest was February 18 to March 26, 2020, during the pandemic crash. The longest ran from October 2015 to March 2018 and covered the whole 2017 rally (source: FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis).
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, Decrypt, Cointelegraph, 24/7 Wall St., Investopedia, StockCharts, FactSet, Finance Research Letters and BloFin, current as of October 7, 2026.
This article is educational and general in nature, not financial or investment advice. A golden cross arrives after a price move has started and has been followed by large falls, including a 59.1% drop in the year after the September 2021 cross, and a leveraged position opened on the signal can be liquidated in a sharp pullback, losing all the margin behind it. Past performance does not indicate future results. Nothing here is a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any asset. BloFin services are not available in restricted locations, including the United States. Do your own research, and consider a licensed professional before making financial decisions. BloFin does not provide investment advice.