Bitcoin's volatility has plunged, but extreme price swings are more frequent than in 2018
Source: CoinDesk ·
From the source
CoinDesk analysis finds 10 unusually large trading days in 2026, raising questions about how investors measure risk in an increasingly institutional crypto market. Bitcoin BTC $82,486.39 is experiencing more unusually large price swings this year than during the 2018 bear market, even as its overall volatility has fallen sharply, and that's a challenge for anyone relying on standard risk models. The largest cryptocurrency has recorded 10 days in 2026 when its price moved at least three standard deviations from its recent trading pattern, according to a CoinDesk analysis. That's more than the eight such days recorded during all of 2018, when bitcoin lost 73% of its value. Traders measure these unusually large moves in ‘sigma,’ a measure of how far an asset's price typically deviates from its normal behavior. To quantify them, CoinDesk compared each day's price move with bitcoin's 30-day realized volatility, a measure of how much its price typically moved each day over the previous…