Halving Dates and What Happened After Each One

Entry last verified June 2026. The halving is a protocol rule reducing the block subsidy by half every 210,000 blocks.

The record

Halving	Date	Subsidy after	Approximate months to subsequent peak
First	November 2012	25 BTC	12
Second	July 2016	12.5 BTC	17
Third	May 2020	6.25 BTC	18
Fourth	April 2024	3.125 BTC	19

The next is expected around 2028, reducing the subsidy to 1.5625 BTC.

What the data shows

Each halving has been followed by a period of price appreciation ending in a peak, then a substantial decline.

The interval between halving and peak has lengthened each time. Whether that is a weakening mechanism, a consequence of a larger market, or noise across four observations cannot be determined from four observations.

The mechanism, and why it has weakened

The argument is that halving the subsidy halves the flow of new supply reaching the market, which raises price if demand is constant.

The size of that effect depends on new issuance relative to trading volume. In 2012, daily issuance was a meaningful fraction of daily volume. It is now a very small one, because volume has grown by orders of magnitude while issuance has fallen.

A supply reduction that is small relative to the flow through order books produces a correspondingly small price effect.

What else changed over the same period

The halvings did not occur in isolation.

Period	Other significant developments
2012 to 2016	First exchanges at scale; Mt. Gox failure
2016 to 2020	Token issuance boom and collapse; institutional custody emerges
2020 to 2024	Monetary expansion; corporate treasury adoption; spot ETFs approved
2024 onward	ETF flows become the dominant marginal demand channel

Attributing the subsequent price behaviour to the halving alone requires ignoring all of it.

The honest statement

Four observations, each accompanied by substantial confounding events, in a market whose structure changed fundamentally between each one.

That is not sufficient to establish a causal relationship, and it is not sufficient to dismiss one. It is what the record contains.

Practical note

The halving date is a block height, not a calendar date. It is reached when the block count arrives, which depends on how quickly blocks are produced, and estimates shift by days as hash rate changes.

Countdown sites compute it from the current block height and average interval. Any date quoted more than a few weeks ahead is an estimate with error bars.