Cycle dashboard/Indicators/NUPL
Bitcoin on-chain indicator
Bitcoin NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss)
NUPL asks what share of Bitcoin's total network value is unrealized profit sitting in holders' hands. It uses the same two quantities as MVRV — market cap and realized cap — but normalises by market cap instead of by a standard deviation, which keeps it bounded at 1 above and makes it read naturally as a percentage of network value.
Reading the latest public snapshot. This page shows the raw NUPL value in its own unit, not a normalised score.
- BTC price that day
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- Historical percentile
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- Full-history range
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- This cycle's peak
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- Site cycle zone
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- Cycle Compass verdict
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Public data refreshes every six hours.
Bitcoin NUPL, full history in raw units
loading history…NUPL (left axis, raw units) BTC price (right axis, log) 0 · 0.55 · 0.75 reference levels
Loading the public daily series…
What the NUPL is, and exactly how it is computed
Two inputs, both derived from free CoinMetrics Community fields (CapMrktCurUSD,
CapMVRVCur). Realized cap is market cap divided by the MVRV ratio.
That identity is worth internalising: NUPL and MVRV are the same information in different clothes. MVRV 1.00 is NUPL 0. MVRV 2.00 is NUPL 0.50. MVRV 0.50 is NUPL −1.00. NUPL can never exceed 1, but it has no floor — as MVRV falls toward zero, NUPL falls without limit, which is why the 2011 trough of −1.59 is possible at all.
Approximation disclosure
Realized cap here is derived from public market-cap and MVRV-ratio fields, not from an in-house UTXO-level pipeline. Dashboards running their own realized-cap computation will differ, and some publish NUPL only for long-term holders (LTH-NUPL) or short-term holders, which are different series with different ranges. This page is the whole-supply, entity-unadjusted version.
How the levels are read
The band names below — Capitulation, Hope/Fear, Optimism/Anxiety, Belief/Denial, Euphoria/Greed — are the conventional labels used across the on-chain analytics field, not CryptoTIDE's invention, and they are sentiment descriptions rather than measurements. CryptoTIDE's own thresholds are the two in the right-hand column.
| Band | Conventional label | What it describes | Role in CryptoTIDE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Below 0 | Capitulation | Market cap under realized cap: aggregate unrealized loss. 13.4% of all days. | Bottom-side realized cost-basis family |
| 0 – 0.25 | Hope / Fear | A small slice of network value is unrealized profit. | No flag |
| 0.25 – 0.50 | Optimism / Anxiety | Middle of the historical range. | No flag |
| 0.50 – 0.75 | Belief / Denial | Most of network value is unrealized profit. 25.3% of days are above 0.55. | Top-risk family active at 0.55 |
| 0.75 and above | Euphoria / Greed | The extreme tail: 3.4% of all days. | Top-risk pressure flash level |
What every Bitcoin cycle actually printed
NUPL at each cycle's own extreme, from the public series charted above.
| Cycle | Peak NUPL | BTC price then | Post-peak trough | BTC price then |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2011 cycle | 0.878 2010-11-06 | $0.4000 | -1.585 2011-10-19 | $2.22 |
| 2013 cycle | 0.830 2013-11-18 | $658 | -0.774 2015-01-14 | $176 |
| 2017 cycle | 0.788 2017-12-07 | $17,032 | -0.448 2018-12-15 | $3,185 |
| 2021 cycle | 0.747 2021-02-21 | $57,501 | -0.326 2022-11-09 | $15,758 |
| 2025 cycle (open) | 0.640 2024-03-11 | $72,198 | 0.119 so far 2026-06-06 | $60,772 |
Cycle windows run low-to-low, using the same boundaries as the dashboard's cycle map: 18 Nov 2011, 14 Jan 2015, 15 Dec 2018 and 9 Nov 2022. The trough column is the lowest reading after that cycle's peak. The table is recomputed in your browser from the published series, so it stays correct as new data arrives.
Peak-to-peak, NUPL has fallen every cycle: 0.878 → 0.830 → 0.788 → 0.747 → 0.640. Each cycle top has printed a lower extreme than the one before it, so a level that was ordinary in 2013 has not been reached since.
NUPL is the clearest case on this site of two-sided compression. The peaks fall — 0.878, 0.830, 0.788, 0.747, 0.640 — and the troughs get shallower at the same time: −1.59, −0.77, −0.45, −0.33, and so far in the open cycle a low of +0.12 that has not gone negative at all. The oscillation is narrowing from both ends.
The practical consequence is that the famous "Euphoria" band above 0.75 has not been entered since 18 December 2017. Two complete cycle tops, including the February 2021 peak at 0.747, have come close and stopped short. A reader waiting for the Euphoria band as confirmation of anything has been waiting through two cycles.
Limits worth knowing before you lean on this
It is MVRV, restated. NUPL is exactly 1 − 1/MVRV. Charting NUPL, MVRV, MVRV-Z and realized price as four independent confirmations is charting one dataset four times. CryptoTIDE groups all four into a single realized-cost-basis evidence family for precisely this reason.
"Unrealized profit" is not spendable. The metric assumes every coin's last on-chain movement was an economic purchase. Lost coins, cold-storage reshuffles and exchange-internal transfers all break that assumption, and none of them represent a holder deciding anything.
Band names are narrative, not data. Capitulation, Belief, Euphoria are convenient labels attached to numeric ranges after the fact. They describe where the number is, not what any market participant is feeling.
Questions people ask about the NUPL
What is NUPL in Bitcoin?
NUPL — Net Unrealized Profit/Loss — is the difference between Bitcoin's market capitalisation and its realized capitalisation, divided by market capitalisation. It reads as the share of total network value that is currently unrealized profit. Negative NUPL means the market in aggregate is sitting on an unrealized loss.
How is NUPL calculated?
NUPL = (market cap − realized cap) ÷ market cap. CryptoTIDE derives realized cap as market cap divided by the MVRV ratio, using free CoinMetrics Community fields. Algebraically NUPL is identical to 1 − 1/MVRV, so the two metrics carry the same information.
What do the NUPL bands mean?
The conventional labels are Capitulation below 0, Hope/Fear from 0 to 0.25, Optimism/Anxiety from 0.25 to 0.50, Belief/Denial from 0.50 to 0.75, and Euphoria/Greed above 0.75. They are narrative names attached to numeric ranges, widely used across on-chain analytics. Historically, days below 0 account for 13.4% of the series and days above 0.75 for 3.4%.
What is the difference between NUPL and MVRV?
They are the same two quantities combined differently: MVRV is market cap divided by realized cap, while NUPL is the gap between them as a fraction of market cap. NUPL equals 1 − 1/MVRV exactly. MVRV is unbounded above and floored at 0; NUPL is capped at 1 and unbounded below. Treating them as independent confirmation of each other double-counts one dataset.
Related Bitcoin cycle indicators
No single gauge carries a cycle read on its own. CryptoTIDE groups correlated metrics into families so that four views of the same realized-cap data cannot vote four times — the reasoning is on the methodology page, and the combined live read is on the Bitcoin cycle dashboard.