It’s 312 again this year, and this number has left countless cryptocurrency investors with lingering fears.
On Thursday, March 12, 2020, I was curled up in my rental house after get off work, surfing the Internet. After 6:30, my phone kept sounding alarms, and a ghost story unfolded:
The price of Bitcoin fell freely from $7,000 at the time, falling to a low of $3,800 without any resistance, setting the largest single-day drop in Bitcoin history.
Ethereum plummeted from around $200 to $90, a drop of more than 50%.
Cryptocurrency has ushered in the darkest day in its history. Various cryptocurrency communities are wailing. The editor is shocked and sad: Is the industry going to be gone? Should I change my career?
This is not because I am overly pessimistic. On that day, panic spread like a plague. PayPal co-founder Wang Li also told his colleagues that night: This industry is over.
Bitcoin has fallen continuously, from $7,000 to $6,000 to $5,000. Each decline has triggered a series of leverage liquidations, with 100,000 people liquidating their positions. Even with 2-3x leverage, many people have not been spared. Ethereum has continued to fall, and the DeFi protocol MakerDAO has also experienced leverage liquidations and is facing a bad debt crisis...
The exchanges were overloaded, many platforms were paralyzed, and it was a doomsday scene.
At the moment of crisis, BitMEX, the largest derivatives platform at the time, crashed. Later, the industry widely believed that the BitMEX crash (pulling the network cable) saved the industry. If the network cable had not been unplugged, Bitcoin would have faced a greater price crisis.
The 312 crash was not an isolated incident, but a storm brought about by the intersection of multiple factors:
Global outbreak: COVID-19 spread rapidly around the world, causing market panic;
Traditional financial markets plunged: U.S. stocks rarely experienced two circuit breakers in a single week. The Nasdaq index plummeted 8.4% in a single day, and the Dow Jones index also recorded its largest single-day drop since 1987.
Oil price crisis: The oil price war between Saudi Arabia and Russia further exacerbated market panic, and oil prices plummeted and later fell into negative territory.
This is an external macro factor, and within the crypto market, the long-accumulated excessive leverage was detonated overnight, and panic selling led to liquidity depletion, exacerbating price declines.
In summary, the collapse of the global financial market caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, coupled with the structural defects of the early crypto market of "high leverage + low liquidity", jointly created this crisis.
However, it was this crisis that became a turning point for the maturity of the crypto market.
After 312, Bitcoin began a long and steady road to recovery.
From the low of $3,800 in March 2020 to the all-time high of nearly $69,000 in November 2021, and then to January 20, 2025, Bitcoin once broke through $108,000, with the maximum increase of more than 28 times.
Ethereum once climbed from a low of $90 to a high of $4,800, an increase of more than 53 times.
SOL fell to a low of $0.5 and reached a high of $293, an increase of more than 580 times.
More importantly, the 312 crisis has spawned a number of innovations in the crypto industry:
DeFi has experienced explosive growth: After March 12, DeFi (decentralized finance) ushered in the DeFi Summer, ushering in the most magnificent era of wealth creation in the history of cryptocurrency.
Institutional entry is accelerating: large institutions such as MicroStrategy and Tesla have begun to include Bitcoin in their balance sheets, and El Salvador has adopted Bitcoin as legal tender.
Market structure optimization: The crypto derivatives market is more mature and the liquidity provision mechanism is more sound.
Every veteran in the cryptocurrency circle who has experienced 312, looking back on the past, may be both afraid and regretful, afraid that the market will encounter such turbulence again, and regretting not going all in to buy at the bottom. The cruelty and opportunities of the market often coexist.
All the projects and investors that survived the 312 Incident have gone through extreme tests.
No matter how the market changes in the future, we have already witnessed the most extreme situations and can say with confidence: We even survived 312, so what else is there to be afraid of?
Since its birth, Bitcoin has been declared "dead" more than 400 times. From the first major crash in 2011, to the Mt.Gox incident in 2014, to the bear market trough in 2018, to the March 12 crash in 2020, Bitcoin has experienced countless tragic declines of up to 80% or even 90%.
However, after each crash, Bitcoin can rise from the ashes and create new historical highs. This extraordinary vitality is the perfect interpretation of Nietzsche's words: "What does not kill me makes me stronger."
The history of Bitcoin tells us that in this highly uncertain market, the most important thing is not short-term gains and losses, but long-term survival. As long as you survive, there is a chance to create new miracles.
As Buffett said: “The first rule of investing is not to lose money. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.” In the crypto market, this wisdom can be translated into: “The first rule is to stay alive. The second rule is not to forget the first rule.”
Finally, let us repeat that sentence: We even survived March 12, so what else do we have to fear?
