Bitcoin rebounded from a $3,457 low but ended the week down 29%

Bitcoin reached a new 2018 low on November 25 before recovering sharply enough to narrow—but not erase—one of its most severe weekly declines.

Coinbase Exchange’s BTC-USD market fell to $3,456.78 during the November 25 UTC session and ended the daily bucket at $3,936.69. The 13.9% recovery from the low to the endpoint is a Coinburn calculation using the exchange’s unrounded values. Bitcoin nevertheless finished 29.2% below Coinbase’s $5,560 endpoint on November 18.

Bitstamp recorded a closely matching pattern in BTC/USD: a $3,474.73 low and $3,938.89 UTC endpoint on November 25. Its price recovered 13.4% from the session low, while the Monday-through-Sunday window fell 29.1% from the November 19 opening value of $5,553.01.

The two venues therefore independently captured the same consequential development: an extreme intraday extension of the 2018 selloff followed by a material recovery before the weekly window closed.

An early 36% reading did not describe the completed week

At 6:00 a.m. Eastern on November 25, CoinDesk reported bitcoin near $3,520 on Bitstamp, 36% below the November 19 opening price. It warned that bitcoin was approaching its largest weekly decline since April 2013, while explicitly stating that confirmation depended on the eventual UTC close.

That distinction became important. Bitstamp’s completed November 25 endpoint was nearly $419 above the early $3,520 observation. The resulting Monday-open-to-Sunday-end decline was approximately 29.1%, not 36%.

CoinMarketCap’s separate November 25 historical snapshot placed bitcoin at $4,009.97, up 3.82% over its rolling 24-hour period but down 28.30% over seven days. Its reported price, return windows and aggregated venue methodology differed from the exchange candles, so the figures cannot be substituted for one another. They nevertheless confirm that a rebound occurred while the broader weekly loss remained severe.

Losses extended beyond bitcoin

CoinMarketCap’s snapshot showed ether down 33.26% over seven days at $116.45. Bitcoin Cash was down 52.16% at $184.58, while Stellar, Cardano and Tezos registered seven-day declines of 35.10%, 38.16% and 45.36%, respectively.

Those observations show that the contraction was market-wide rather than confined to one BTC-USD order book. They do not establish a common cause. Contemporaneous reporting discussed the contentious Bitcoin Cash split, regulatory pressure and weakening speculative demand, but the cited evidence does not isolate the contribution of any one factor.

The November 25 low also carried historical significance. Contemporaneous reporting identified the Bitstamp level as bitcoin’s lowest since September 2017. That comparison describes the venue’s price history; it is not a claim that every global exchange printed the same low.

Why the completed window mattered

Cryptocurrency trades continuously, without a consolidated closing auction. An intraday drawdown, a UTC exchange candle and an aggregated rolling seven-day snapshot can all be accurate while producing different percentages.

November 25 demonstrated that limitation unusually clearly. An early observation supported a 36% drawdown from the Monday open, but the subsequent recovery reduced the completed exchange-window loss to approximately 29%. Neither figure was fabricated; they measured different endpoints.

The recovery did not establish that the bear market had ended, just as the session low did not prove that another immediate decline was inevitable. What the completed record established was narrower: bitcoin reached a 14-month low, recovered roughly 13% on two major dollar venues and still ended an exceptionally damaging week about 29% below its starting reference.