What is bear market?

An extended period of falling prices, informally defined as a decline of 20% or more from recent highs.

Crypto bear markets have historically been deeper and longer than those in traditional markets. The 20% threshold is borrowed from equities and fits crypto poorly, since a 20% move can happen in a day without indicating anything about a trend.

The label is applied after the fact and by whoever is speaking. There is no committee that declares one, no agreed start date, and no agreed measure. Treat it as shorthand for a mood rather than as a defined market state.

How it works

The conventional definition takes a closing high, measures the percentage decline from it, and calls 20% a bear market. Which high, which venue, and which currency all change the answer, and so does whether you measure closes or intraday prints.

Crypto complicates this in three ways. Daily volatility is high enough that the threshold gets crossed and uncrossed repeatedly. Markets trade continuously with no closing bell, so "the close" is a convention. And different assets fall by very different amounts in the same period, so an index-level statement hides enormous dispersion.

What actually changes during extended declines is mechanical rather than emotional. Trading volumes fall, spreads widen, and order-book depth thins, which means the same order size costs more to execute than it did months earlier. Venues delist thin assets. Lending rates and staking yields fall as leverage unwinds.

None of that is predictive. It describes conditions you can measure now.

Example

Illustrative: an asset falls from $100 to $78, a 22% decline, which crosses the conventional threshold. It then rallies to $85 and falls to $72. Depending on the day you ask and whether you measure from the original high or the intermediate one, the same price series is described as a bear market, a correction, or a recovery. The prices are facts; the label is not.

Why it matters when you buy

Extended declines change your execution costs, not just the price you see. Spreads widen and depth thins, so a given order moves the price more than it would have in a busier market, and thinly traded assets can become hard to sell at anything near the quoted price. Check current depth for what you hold at the liquidity pages rather than assuming a chart price is achievable.

Related terms

• bull market — the opposite label
• volatility — the measure that makes the threshold noisy
• liquidity — what thins out during extended declines
• spread — widens when market makers pull back
• delisting — what happens to thin assets
• dollar cost averaging — a mechanical schedule that ignores the label

Questions

Who decides when a bear market starts?

Nobody. It is a description used by commentators, applied retrospectively, with no standard reference price or index. Different sources will date the same period differently.

Does a bear market mean prices will keep falling?

No. It describes what has already happened. RampAtlas does not forecast prices and no reliable method exists for predicting the end of a decline.

Why do fees feel higher when prices fall?

Because spreads widen and order books thin, so the cost of crossing the market rises even when the venue's published fee schedule has not changed.