An all-time low (ATL) is the lowest price at which an asset has ever traded since it first became available. The term is used for shares, currencies and commodities, but it is especially common in crypto, where price-tracking sites list each token's ATL next to its all-time high (ATH), together with the date each was reached and the percentage change since.
For an established asset such as Bitcoin (BTC), the ATL is a historical curiosity from its earliest days. For a newly launched token, by contrast, the ATL may be recent and may be broken repeatedly, especially in a bear market. A token that sets a fresh ATL is trading lower than every buyer before it paid, which means every earlier holder is showing a loss.
All-time low in plain terms
Think of the lowest temperature ever recorded in a town. It is a single fact from the past: the coldest the town has ever been. A new record low on today's weather report tells you that today is colder than any day before it. It does not tell you whether tomorrow will be warmer.
An all-time low works the same way for prices. It marks the cheapest the asset has ever been. If a coin hits a new all-time low, nobody who bought it earlier is in profit, and the market has not yet found a level where buyers are willing to step in.
How the ATL is measured
Measuring an ATL is less straightforward than it sounds. Data providers make several choices:
- Which venues count. Aggregators combine prices from many cryptocurrency exchanges; including or excluding a single thin market can change the recorded low.
- Intraday or closing prices. A brief spike down on one exchange may be counted as the ATL by one site and ignored by another that uses daily closes.
- Start date. Some trackers begin when a token is first listed on a centralized exchange (CEX); others include earlier trading on a decentralized exchange (DEX) or private sale prices.
- Quote currency. A token can hit an ATL against the US dollar while not doing so against Bitcoin, or the reverse.
The change from ATL is usually shown as a percentage. If a token's ATL was $0.50 and it now trades at $2.00, it is up 300% from its ATL, because . Combined with the fall from its ATH, this gives a quick picture of where the price sits within its full history.
Notable lows
Bitcoin's earliest prices date from 2009–10, when early users first tried to put a dollar value on coins that had no market; the first published exchange rates valued one bitcoin at well under a cent. The famous purchase of two pizzas for 10,000 bitcoins in May 2010 is often cited from that period. Since then, the lowest points of each cycle have been far above those levels, which is why Bitcoin's ATL is rarely discussed.
For many other tokens the ATL is the end of the story. The Terra project's LUNA token traded above $80 in early May 2022 and, after its linked algorithmic stablecoin lost its peg, fell to a tiny fraction of a cent within days. Tokens abandoned after a rug pull, or wound down after an exchange failure such as Mt. Gox or FTX, often set their ATL close to zero and never recover. Heavy token unlock schedules, where large amounts of new supply reach the market, are another common cause of fresh lows for young tokens.
What an ATL signals
An ATL on its own is not a buy or sell signal. Traders sometimes treat a fresh low as capitulation and look for a rebound, but many such rebounds turn out to be a dead cat bounce. Momentum readings such as a very low relative strength index (RSI) can stay depressed while a token keeps setting new lows, and slogans such as BTFD have encouraged buying that later turned into deeper losses for bagholders.
A token near its ATL may also suffer from low liquidity, so even a small order can move the price sharply and a quoted low may not reflect a price at which anyone could actually trade in size. Analysts therefore look at the reasons for a decline, including the token's tokenomics, its market capitalization relative to its fully diluted valuation (FDV), and on-chain usage such as daily active addresses, rather than at the ATL figure itself.