Two years ago this month, on April 19, 2024, Bitcoin's fourth halving fired automatically at block 840,000. The new-coin issuance rate was cut in half β from 6.25 BTC per block down to 3.125 BTC. Roughly 450 new bitcoin per day instead of 900.
Two years later, the price has gone from ~$60,000 to ~$95,000. Spot ETFs have absorbed over $50 billion in net inflows. The cycle has been more orderly than the previous three. And the question on everyone's mind is the same one that's been asked at every halving: does it still matter?
Every 210,000 blocks β roughly every four years β Bitcoin's protocol cuts the reward miners receive for finding a new block in half. This is hard-coded into the software that every Bitcoin node runs. There is no committee that votes on it. There is no central bank that announces it. It happens automatically when the block height ticks past the threshold.
The economic effect is simple: the supply of new Bitcoin entering the market is cut in half overnight. If demand stays constant, price has to rise to clear the market. If demand grows during a period of declining supply, price tends to rise faster than linear.
For more on the technical mechanics, see how the halving works.
The halving block (840,000) was mined at approximately 00:09 UTC on April 20, 2024, by ViaBTC [1]. The block contained an OP_RETURN inscription with the phrase "NYT 03/Apr/2024 BTC ETF flows" β a reference to the spot Bitcoin ETF approval that had happened three months earlier and a callback to Satoshi's original genesis-block headline about bank bailouts.
Bitcoin's price at the moment of the halving was approximately $62,700. Transaction fees in the hours surrounding the event spiked dramatically, with some blocks containing fees totaling more than the new 3.125 BTC subsidy itself β partly due to a meme-token launch that briefly congested the network.
Hash rate, the measure of total computational power securing the network, dipped briefly as the least efficient miners were forced offline by the suddenly-halved subsidy. It recovered to new all-time highs within four months as more efficient hardware came online and transaction fee revenue compensated for the lost subsidy.
The 2024 cycle looks different from previous cycles. Here's the timeline:
That's a very different shape from the 2017 or 2021 cycles, which were characterized by parabolic blow-off tops followed by 75-85% drawdowns. So far the 2024 cycle has been an institutional grind rather than a retail-driven mania. See the full price history.
Every halving has been followed by a substantial price increase within 12-18 months. The pattern is real, but the magnitude has diminished each cycle as the market has matured:
The diminishing-returns pattern is mechanical. Bitcoin's market cap was $200M after halving 1, $11B after halving 2, $170B after halving 3, and over $1.2T after halving 4. Doubling a $200M asset is plausible weekly. Doubling a $1.2T asset is a larger lift than the entire annual flow into the gold market.
Several models attempt to forecast Bitcoin's price using halving cycles. The most cited is PlanB's stock-to-flow model, which treats Bitcoin like a commodity and predicts price as a function of supply scarcity [2]. That model has been roughly correct over multi-year timeframes and roughly wrong on yearly precision. It currently suggests Bitcoin is somewhere between fairly valued and significantly underpriced.
Other models β Power Law (Giovanni Santostasi), the Mayer Multiple, MVRV β give different forecasts. They all agree on the direction (up) and disagree on the magnitude and timing.
Here's what we actually know with confidence:
The biggest unknown is whether the halving cycle continues to drive price in the way it has historically. As Bitcoin matures and ETF flows dominate, the marginal new buyer may be less responsive to a 0.4%-of-supply issuance change than they were when halvings cut a meaningful percentage of new sell pressure. Some analysts argue the post-2024 cycle has already broken the pattern.
Others argue the opposite: that the supply cliff matters more, not less, as the marginal seller is replaced by long-term ETF holders. The historical record covers four cycles. Statistical confidence on a four-event sample is honestly very low.
What's certain is the supply schedule. Roughly 1.1 million Bitcoin remain to be mined out of the 21 million cap, and that issuance will keep halving every four years until the last fraction of a satoshi enters circulation around the year 2140. Whether you believe in the halving as a price-setting mechanism or just as an interesting feature of a credibly fixed-supply asset, the schedule is set. The case for Bitcoin doesn't depend on the next halving cycle going up β only on the cap holding and adoption continuing.
Last updated April 14, 2026. Not financial advice.