Bull vs Bear Markets in Crypto: What the Words Mean
What bull and bear markets are, taught through crypto's real cycles: the 84% bear of 2018, the 77% bear of 2022, and the vocabulary traders lean on.
TL;DR
- A bull market is a sustained broad rise; a bear market is a sustained broad fall, made official in traditional markets at a 20% drop.
- Crypto runs hotter: the 2018 bear cut bitcoin roughly 84% and the 2022 bear roughly 77%, each about a year peak to trough.
- Bitcoin crossed $100,000 in December 2024, years after the 2022 low; the cycles have rhymed so far, but nothing schedules the next one.
- Vocabulary that earns its keep: bear-market rally, capitulation, alt season, bitcoin dominance.
- This is a vocabulary guide with no forecasts in it, and none of it is financial advice.
In December 2017 bitcoin brushed $20,000 and every dip lasted about a day, so relatives who had never once mentioned money in their lives were suddenly asking how to buy it, and twelve months later the same coin traded near $3,200, down roughly 84%, and the group chats had gone quiet.
Crypto borrowed two old words for that whiplash. A bull market is the up half and a bear market is the down half. This guide is the vocabulary, taught through cycles that actually happened, and it makes no forecasts. None of it is financial advice.
The words, and the stories traders tell about them
A bull market is a long, broad rise: one green week does not qualify, it means months of climbing prices and swelling confidence. A bear market is a long, broad fall, and traditional markets make it official at a 20% drop from the peak.
Crypto makes that threshold look almost quaint: the 2018 bear did not stop at 20%, it kept going, and by the bottom 84% of bitcoin's peak price was gone.
As for the animals, the usual story says a bull attacks by tossing its horns upward while a bear swipes its claws downward, and an older telling ties the bear to eighteenth-century dealers who sold bearskins they had not yet caught. Both are folklore, nobody has a receipt for the origin, traders repeat the stories anyway, and as memory hooks they work, which is all they have to do.
One full lap: 2017 to 2018
The 2017 run peaked in December with bitcoin at about $20,000. What followed is the cleanest bear market crypto has on record: prices slid for most of 2018, and by that December bitcoin sat near $3,200, roughly 84% below the top and a very long way from the family dinners.
The slide was not a straight line, because 2018 threw up several bear-market rallies, sharp temporary rises inside the downtrend, and every one of them got called the bottom before it failed.
The end of the process has a name as well. Capitulation is the point where holders stop debating and sell just to make it stop, and late 2018 is the example traders still reach for, because the arguments ended, the coins got dumped, and the family-dinner crowd swore off the subject entirely.
The second lap: 2021 to 2022
The next bull peaked in November 2021 with bitcoin around $69,000, and the bear that followed had names attached to it. Terra, a stablecoin system that carried roughly $40bn of paper value, collapsed inside a week in May 2022, and FTX, then one of the biggest exchanges, went bankrupt that November after a run revealed customer money was missing. Bitcoin bottomed near $15,500 in November 2022, a drawdown of roughly 77%, and drawdown is just the word for the fall from a peak to the trough after it, as a percentage.
This bear had rallies too, several of them, each greeted as the turn, and hindsight sorted them out, nothing else did.
Then, in December 2024, bitcoin crossed $100,000, two years after the low, and that is history. The cycles have so far been rhymes, not schedules, and nobody gets issued a timetable.
The rest of the dictionary
A few more terms do heavy lifting in market chatter.
Alt season is what traders call it when the smaller coins outrun bitcoin for a stretch, because money has rotated out of bitcoin into ethereum and on down the list, and for a while the small stuff posts the silly numbers.
Bitcoin dominance is bitcoin's share of the total crypto market's value, roughly half in recent years, and it moves with the cycle, so when somebody declares an alt season they are usually pointing at a falling dominance number.
And capitulation you have already met, in late 2018.
What each half does to people's heads
Bull markets manufacture overconfidence: gains start to feel like skill, borrowed money piles in near the top, and warnings read like a failure of imagination. Bears manufacture despair and washouts instead, and both ends produce the decisions people spend the next cycle regretting.
In the record above, the loudest excitement clustered around $20,000 and $69,000. The deepest silence sat near $3,200 and $15,500. Same coin.
The two bears above each ran about twelve months from peak to trough, and that is the going rate, crypto's bears have tended to run roughly a year or more. And crypto trades around the clock, weekends included, with no market-wide circuit breakers to pause a panic, so a bear never even closes for the night and no bell rings at either end.
The bear-market label tends to get pinned on long after the fall began, which is worth remembering when a headline declares one over.
Reading the words without buying a forecast
You cannot use any of this vocabulary to predict, it only describes, so a falling dominance chart is a statement about recent weeks that says nothing about the coming ones, and capitulation is a diagnosis that gets handed out comfortably after the fact.
Banxa has run the fiat side of this market, the on-ramp and off-ramp plumbing, since 2014, with 100+ payment methods in the markets it serves. That span covers every peak and trough in this article, and the job never changes with the label on the market: money to coins, coins to money. What changes is the mood of the queue.
The words are tools for reading market talk and nothing more, and anyone announcing which half comes next, with a date attached, is guessing, whatever the size of their following, because the record hands out its drawdown numbers strictly in hindsight and has never once rung a bell on time.
Frequently Asked Questions
Traditional markets call a 20% fall from the peak a bear market. Crypto has no referee and swings far harder: the 2018 bear cut bitcoin roughly 84%, and the 2022 bear roughly 77%. In practice people use the word for any long, broad decline.
The two big measured ones each ran about a year peak to trough: December 2017 to December 2018, and November 2021 to November 2022. That is the record so far. Nothing obliges the next one to match it.
The usual story is that a bull attacks by tossing its horns upward while a bear swipes downward, so bulls stand for rising prices and bears for falling ones. An older telling points to eighteenth-century dealers selling bearskins they had not yet caught. Both are folklore rather than documented history, but they make the labels easy to remember.
A sharp temporary rise inside a longer downtrend. Both 2018 and 2022 produced several, and each was greeted as the bottom before prices rolled over again. The label only becomes certain in hindsight.
It is bitcoin's share of the total value of the crypto market, roughly half in recent years. When it falls, smaller coins are outrunning bitcoin, which is what people mean by an alt season. It describes what has already happened, though, and forecasts nothing.
No. The labels get pinned on well after the turn, and every cycle has produced confident calls that aged badly. Dated forecasts of the next top or bottom are best read as marketing.