The Biggest Bitcoin Crashes in History

Hack of Mt. Gox, bans from China, panic over COVID, and the implosion of FTX: Here you have a

The crypto market crash on October 10, 2025 wiped out a record $19 billion in leveraged Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency positions. However, it was far from being one of the largest percentage drops in the price of BTC recorded.

Mt. Gox Flash Crash (June 2011)

This is the biggest one. Bitcoin fell approximately 99.9% on Mt. Gox after a hacker stole hundreds of thousands in BTC and sold it for just a cent. At that time, Mt. Gox facilitated approximately 90% of all Bitcoin trading. Because Mt. Gox dominated Bitcoin trading at that time, the internal collapse of the exchange briefly wiped out nearly all market value.

(Mt. Gox was the most dominant, but not the first Bitcoin exchange, according to Guinness World Records. That title belongs to BitcoinMarket.)

The hack of Mt. Gox occurred on June 15, 2011, but it was not revealed until a few days later. An auditor account of Mt. Gox was compromised and used to steal 740,000 BTC from customers and 100,000 from the company itself. When the attacker sold the BTC, the price plummeted to just cents.

At that time, that amount of Bitcoin would have been worth around $460,000. At current prices, 840,000 Bitcoin would be worth just under $94 billion. That is equivalent to the full BTC treasuries of Michael Saylor's Strategy, Bitcoin miner MARA Holdings, Jack Maller's XXI, the Japanese BTC giant Metaplanet, Adam Back's Bitcoin Standard Treasury Co., and the newly public.

Collapse of Mt. Gox (April 2013)

Bitcoin fell from $265 to $150, losing around 43%, in April 2013 due to what Mt. Gox would later call distributed denial-of-service attacks, or DDoS. A DDoS attack overwhelms a target URL with external requests to prevent it from being accessed by legitimate users. #BTC #ETH #MarketPullback