Bitcoin Ended a Crisis-Struck First Quarter About 10% Lower

Bitcoin ended the first quarter of 2020 roughly 10% below its December 31 level after a pandemic-driven liquidity crisis erased an early-year rally and briefly carried the asset below $4,000 on some markets.

Kraken’s March 31 market report placed bitcoin at $6,499, up 0.39% for the exchange’s dated session, with $155 million traded. Bitcoin accounted for approximately 80% of Kraken’s reported $194 million in total market volume, based on Coinburn’s calculation from those rounded figures.

The quarter-end result mattered because it challenged two competing descriptions of Bitcoin. Its severe March decline showed that it could behave like a risk asset when investors urgently sought cash. Its rebound toward $6,500 showed that the most acute portion of the liquidation had passed by March 31. Neither observation established that Bitcoin was a safe haven or that the market had reached a durable bottom.

Two records put the quarterly loss near 10%

Kraken’s December 31, 2019 report recorded bitcoin at $7,154. Comparing that figure with Kraken’s March 31 reading of $6,499 produces a point-to-point decline of 9.16%. The calculation uses two rounded, venue-level daily observations; it is not a total-return index or a universal cryptocurrency closing price.

CoinMarketCap’s aggregated historical snapshots produced a slightly larger decline. Its December 31 snapshot listed bitcoin at $7,193.60, while its March 31 snapshot showed $6,438.64. Coinburn calculates a decrease of $754.96, or 10.49%, between those observations.

CoinMarketCap also displayed bitcoin’s March 31 market capitalization at $117.81 billion and reported trailing 24-hour volume of $32.79 billion. Its snapshot showed a 0.38% loss over 24 hours and a 3.43% loss over seven days. Those fields describe CoinMarketCap’s aggregation window, not Kraken’s session, and should not be combined as though both providers used one cutoff or methodology.

A contemporaneous CoinDesk report similarly characterized bitcoin as ending the quarter down about 10%. Agreement across the records supports the direction and approximate magnitude of the quarterly result, while their different prices illustrate the absence of a consolidated Bitcoin closing auction.

The quarter concealed an extreme path

The modest-looking quarterly percentage obscured the scale of the March disruption. Contemporaneous Coinbase analysis said bitcoin and other cryptoassets fell about 50% on March 12, with bitcoin briefly trading below $4,000. Coinbase attributed the speed of the decline partly to forced liquidations in highly leveraged cryptocurrency markets, alongside a broader rush for cash across liquid assets.

That explanation was an exchange’s interpretation, not a complete causal decomposition of global trading. No reviewed record identifies every liquidated position, seller or venue. Still, the chronology is clear: bitcoin entered 2020 above $7,000, rallied earlier in the quarter, suffered an exceptional March collapse and recovered part—but not all—of the loss by March 31.

What the quarter-end record established

March 31 established a restrained conclusion: bitcoin survived an acute market-structure test and finished the quarter near $6,500, approximately 9% to 10.5% below the compared December 31 observations. The variation depends on venue, aggregation method and timestamp.

The result did not prove decoupling from equities, validate a safe-haven thesis or establish that leverage had been fully cleared. It instead documented Bitcoin’s position at a precise institutional checkpoint: quarter-end, after one of the most violent liquidity events in the asset’s history, with prices partially recovered but still below year-end levels.