The Third Bitcoin Halving (2020): Market Impact

Bitcoin’s third halving arrived in the middle of a global pandemic, a historic stock market crash, and unprecedented central bank money-printing — a backdrop that made its core message about fixed, predictable scarcity resonate with a wider audience than ever before.

The third halving occurred on May 11, 2020, at block height 630,000, cutting the block reward from 12.5 BTC to 6.25 BTC per block. It landed just two months after Black Thursday, a dramatic crash in March 2020 when Bitcoin’s price fell nearly 50% in a single day alongside a broader global market panic triggered by COVID-19 lockdowns.

The macro backdrop was genuinely unusual compared to the prior two halvings. Central banks around the world responded to the pandemic with massive monetary stimulus and interest rate cuts. For a growing number of investors, Bitcoin’s hard-capped, halving supply schedule became an explicit talking point in contrast to that expansionary monetary policy.

Bitcoin traded around $8,700 at the time of the third halving. Over the following year and a half, it entered its largest bull run to that point, eventually reaching an all-time high near $69,000 in November 2021 — roughly an 8-fold increase from the halving price.

This cycle was also notable as the first where institutional buyers, publicly traded companies adding Bitcoin to corporate treasuries, and eventually regulated investment products became significant, visible participants rather than a fringe curiosity.

This shift toward institutional participation marked a genuine change in who was actually buying, compared to the largely retail-driven rallies of 2013 and 2017 — a maturing of the market’s investor base many analysts consider one of this cycle’s more structurally significant developments.

Want to see how that institutional adoption wave actually unfolded in detail? Continue learning in the Bitcoin Academy.