Bitcoin Fell Below $45,000 as a Record-High Week Reversed

Bitcoin fell below $45,000 on February 26, 2021, extending a rapid reversal from the record reached five days earlier. Coinbase Exchange’s BTC-USD spot market touched $44,150 during the UTC session before recovering to $46,326.20.

The move mattered because it interrupted one of bitcoin’s strongest institutional-adoption runs. Corporate purchases, expanding regulated products and Coinbase’s newly public registration filing had helped move cryptocurrency closer to conventional finance. The February 26 decline demonstrated that this transition had not reduced bitcoin’s exposure to leverage, shifting risk appetite or abrupt changes in global markets.

From a record to a 24% drawdown

Coinbase recorded a $47,063.90 open, $44,150 low, $48,464.64 high and $46,326.20 close for BTC-USD between 00:00 and 24:00 UTC on February 26. The exchange reported 36,048.6181927 BTC of volume in that daily bucket.

Measured from the open, the low represented a 6.19% decline. The close was 1.57% below the open but 4.93% above the session low, showing that buyers recovered much of the intraday fall without restoring the levels seen earlier in the week.

The larger comparison was more severe. Coinbase BTC-USD had reached $58,367 on February 21 and closed that UTC session at $57,489.16. The February 26 low was 24.36% below that peak, while the February 26 close was 19.42% below the February 21 close. These percentages are Coinburn calculations from Coinbase’s venue-level candles, rounded to two decimal places.

Contemporaneous Reuters reporting described bitcoin as heading for an almost 20% weekly loss and its heaviest weekly decline since March 2020. That characterization broadly agrees with the Coinbase close-to-close calculation, but Reuters did not identify the exact venue, cutoff or weekly measurement convention in the surviving syndicated report. It should therefore be treated as an event-day assessment rather than a universal closing statistic.

A bond-market shock reached crypto

The decline unfolded during a sharp repricing of government bonds and other risk-sensitive assets. Federal Reserve records show the 10-year U.S. Treasury constant-maturity yield at 1.37% on February 22 and February 23, 1.38% on February 24 and 1.54% on February 25. It eased to 1.44% on February 26 but remained seven basis points above its February 22 level.

Reuters linked bitcoin’s retreat to the global bond rout, which had pushed yields higher and pressured riskier assets. Blockstream’s February 26 market report offered a similar contemporaneous interpretation, observing that bitcoin had traded more like a risk asset than an inflation hedge during the preceding quarters.

The chronology supports an association, not a single-cause finding. The surviving records cannot isolate how much of bitcoin’s decline resulted from bond-market conditions, profit-taking, derivatives positioning, forced liquidations or exchange-specific liquidity. Bitcoin’s decline had also begun before February 26, following the February 21 record.

What the event-day record established

The defensible conclusion is narrow: on February 26, Coinbase BTC-USD fell below $45,000, recovered above $46,000 and remained roughly one-fifth below its February 21 UTC close. Bitcoin had absorbed a substantial correction even while institutional adoption remained a prominent market theme.

Coinbase represents one dollar-denominated spot market, not a consolidated global tape. Cryptocurrency trades continuously across venues, so prices, volumes and daily boundaries can differ. The February 26 candle establishes what occurred on Coinbase; it does not provide a universal bitcoin close or prove which market force caused the decline.

Later context

Federal Reserve staff later described February 25 as a Treasury-market flash event involving a rapid yield increase and deterioration in liquidity. That retrospective analysis clarifies the macroeconomic environment entering February 26, but it does not establish that Treasury trading alone caused bitcoin’s selloff.