One year after crypto’s worst single-day wipeout, the market has cooled. But the risk that made it so painful has not fully disappeared. On Oct. 10, 2025, more than $19 billion in leveraged b
One year after crypto’s worst single-day wipeout, the market has cooled. But the risk that made it so painful has not fully disappeared.
On Oct. 10, 2025, more than $19 billion in leveraged bets were liquidated in a single day. Bitcoin has since struggled to recover and remains more than 30% below its all-time high.
For Julia Zhou, president of crypto market maker Caladan, the bigger problem last October was not the size of the losses. It was how fast buyers and sellers vanished when the market needed them most.
Traders are now more aware of the risks, she told Bloomberg. But she warned that the market is still “highly fragmented” and that liquidity “can still deteriorate rapidly.”
Traders have been slow to return to borrowed bets. Open interest in Bitcoin perpetual futures, a measure of leveraged trading, stood near $45 billion a year ago. It more than halved within six months of the crash, according to CryptoQuant data cited by Bloomberg.
Analysts don’t see a quick breakout either. QCP Capital expects Bitcoin to trade between $80,000 and $90,000 for the rest of the year.
Some analysts are also watching the US midterm elections. Crypto analyst Ali Charts noted last month that Bitcoin fell between 27% and 72% after each of the past four midterms.
He flagged $73,000 as a key level to watch, though he said the elections did not necessarily cause those drops.
In 2011, Bitcoin fell 94% from $32 to near zero after the Mt. Gox hack. The obituaries were written. It recovered to hit $1,163.
From late 2013 to early 2015, Bitcoin fell about 85%, from $1,133 to roughly $170. It was the longest crash in Bitcoin’s history, and the price didn’t set a new record until March 2017, more than three years later.
When the ICO bubble burst, Bitcoin fell from a peak near $20,000 in December 2017 to $3,122 a year later, a drop of about 84%. Every retail investor who bought near the top was underwater for years. The market recovered anyway.
March 2020 was brutal and brief. Bitcoin lost nearly half its value in a single day during the COVID panic, falling below $4,000. By December it had passed $20,000, beating its 2017 record.
In May 2021, $1 trillion was wiped from crypto in a single week. Bitcoin had touched $64,000 in April.
Then came 2022, the worst in recent memory. Bitcoin had peaked near $69,000 in November 2021. It fell to about $17,600 after Terra Luna imploded, then to about $15,500 as FTX went under.Signs the market has changed
Not everyone is gloomy. Leverage is lower than a year ago, and some exchanges have strengthened their systems for handling forced selling.
VanEck’s Matthew Sigel has also noted that Bitcoin’s volatility has dropped by about half compared with four years ago.
As per Bloomberg, Galaxy Digital’s Lucas Tcheyan went further, saying the market that crashed on Oct. 10 “doesn’t really exist anymore.”
Related: Dave Ramsey's investing advice falls short, study finds
