Bitcoin Price

What this measures

This chart tracks Coin Metrics’ daily bitcoin price in US dollars (BTC/USD). Each point is a closing price fixed at midnight UTC, built from trades recorded on a selection of major spot exchanges, the venues where bitcoin is bought and sold outright, without leverage. Across the history, with one point per day, intraday swings do not show up. The last 30 days are the exception: they come from CoinGecko, hour by hour, to follow the market more closely.

A price set off-chain

The Bitcoin protocol has no notion of price. It counts bitcoin and satoshis (1 BTC = 100 million satoshis), never dollars. The price is formed elsewhere, in the order books of exchanges where buyers and sellers meet.

So there is no single bitcoin price, only slightly different prices from one exchange to the next. A reference rate like Coin Metrics’ aggregates them and filters out venues it considers unreliable, which smooths the gaps without removing them. They widen when capital cannot move freely: in 2017 and 2018, bitcoin traded at a clear premium in South Korea, a gap nicknamed the “kimchi premium”.

Over several years, think in percentages: a $1,000 drop does not mean the same thing at $5,000 as at $60,000.

Volatility says little about the network

The first known commercial transaction dates back to May 22, 2010, when Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoin for 2 pizzas. Since then, the price has gone through several cycles of rapid gains followed by drawdowns of more than 70%. The episodes that shaped the curve often had more to do with intermediaries than with the protocol: the collapse of Mt. Gox in 2014, that of FTX in November 2022, then the arrival of US spot ETFs in January 2024.

Volatility remains one of the most common objections to bitcoin as a unit of account. Yet it says nothing about the health of the network: blocks keep arriving roughly every 10 minutes, whatever the price. Price does, however, weigh directly on mining economics, as hashprice shows.

🪙 Is Bitcoin (BTC) Really a Currency?

Multiplied by the number of bitcoin issued, this price gives market capitalization. Set against trading volume, it shows whether a move happened in an active market or a thin one.

The reference price of an asset designed to do without intermediaries is set almost entirely by intermediaries. For anyone holding their own keys, the price changes what their bitcoin is worth in dollars, not how much bitcoin they own.