Public methodology
How CryptoTIDE reads the Bitcoin cycle
CryptoTIDE is a BTC-only, educational cycle dashboard. It does not use private trading data, private strategy code, paid feeds, or personalized portfolio inputs. The goal is simple: show where BTC sits in the long cycle and whether risk-management pressure is rising.
The dashboard has three distinct concepts:
- Cycle Compass — TIDE 2.0: post-halving clock as prior, family-capped state evidence as confirmation, and a confluence verdict.
- TIDE bottom lens — the legacy 0-1 valuation heat gauge. Low means accumulation context; it remains useful for bottom/DCA context but is not treated as a full top detector.
- Top-risk pressure — a separate evidence gauge that rises when multiple top-risk families align. It is not a sell signal.
Primary sources
Data sources
| Source | Used for | Why |
|---|---|---|
| CoinMetrics Community API | BTC price, MVRV ratio, market cap, daily issuance USD, current supply | Free, keyless public endpoint with long BTC history. |
| bitcoin-data.com free endpoints | Support lines such as STH/LTH realized price, Thermo price, SOPR, Reserve Risk where available | Useful explanatory context; not required for the core TIDE history. |
| Binance public funding API | BTCUSDT perpetual funding-rate history | Measures derivatives crowding and leverage heat. |
| Binance public open-interest API | BTCUSDT open-interest context | Confirms whether derivatives exposure is expanding or flushing out. |
The site should cite public sources because trust is part of the product: visitors need to understand what is measured, where the data comes from, and what the limits are.
Thermo Price is shown as Thermocap-per-BTC / security-spend context. It is not the marginal production cost of mining one BTC today. Funding is displayed as the latest raw 8-hour Binance funding print. An annualized figure is still computed internally to gauge leverage crowding (it feeds the lean read and partial-TP context) but is no longer surfaced in the UI.
TIDE 2.0
Cycle Compass: clock plus state evidence
The headline read uses two axes. The first axis is the Bitcoin halving clock: days since the latest halving mapped into broad phase bands. The second axis is state evidence: bottom and top-risk families built from public valuation, trend, miner, drawdown, and holder cost-basis data.
The clock is the structural prior. State evidence confirms or contradicts it. Top-window reads lean more on timing because absolute on-chain heat has shown diminishing returns across cycles. Bottom reads require stronger on-chain/cost-basis confirmation because capitulation still has an economic floor.
| Clock says | State says | Public verdict | Conviction |
|---|---|---|---|
| Top window | Top-risk families elevated | Top-risk confluence | High |
| Top window | Top-risk muted | Timing-led top watch | Medium |
| Mid-cycle | Top-risk families elevated | Local overheat | Low |
| Bottom window / Bear | Bottom families elevated | Bottom confluence | Medium / High |
| Bottom window / Bear | Bottom families muted | Timing-led bottom watch | Medium |
| Mid-cycle | Bottom families elevated | Local washout | Low |
This is deliberately not an exact probability model. Bitcoin has only a few independent market cycles and daily observations are autocorrelated, so the site reports ordinal context and family counts instead of point probabilities.
TIDE score
The legacy 0-1 bottom/valuation lens
The legacy TIDE heat gauge averages normalized valuation lenses. Each lens is mapped to a fixed 0-1 band and then averaged. The bands are intentionally simple and transparent; they can be tuned later against history.
| Lens | Formula | Normalization | Meaning |
|---|---|---|---|
| MVRV-Z | (market cap - realized cap) / cumulative std(market cap) | 0 to 7 | High values mean market value is stretched above holder cost basis. |
| Mayer Multiple | BTC price / 200-day moving average | 0.8 to 2.4 | Shows whether price is depressed or extended versus its long trend. |
| Puell Multiple | daily issuance value USD / 365-day average issuance value USD | 0.3 to 4.0 | Shows whether miner revenue is unusually weak or euphoric. |
| Log-regression quantile | current price residual versus BTC log-price/log-age trend | 0 to 1 | Shows where price sits relative to long-term power-law style trend. |
MVRV-Z is computed in-house from public CoinMetrics market-cap and MVRV-ratio fields. That makes the calculation transparent and reproducible, but it should be treated as a CryptoTIDE approximation; values can differ slightly from vendor charts that use proprietary realized-cap pipelines.
Zones: BTC Accumulation Zone below 0.20, Early Accumulation below 0.40, Neutral below 0.60, Distribution below 0.80, and Euphoria above that.
Top-risk evidence
Top-risk pressure
Top-risk pressure is separate from Absolute TIDE. It asks a different question: how broadly are historically stretched valuation, trend, miner, timing and derivatives conditions aligning?
It describes evidence intensity. It does not prescribe a portfolio action.
| Driver | Watch | Flash | Why it matters |
|---|---|---|---|
| MVRV-Z | 3.5 | 7.0 | Market cap far above realized cap has historically clustered near overheated phases. |
| NUPL | 0.55 | 0.75 | High unrealized profit means many holders are sitting on large paper gains. |
| Mayer Multiple | 1.8 | 2.4 | Price becomes stretched above its 200-day trend. |
| Puell Multiple | 2.5 | 4.0 | Miner revenue becomes unusually high versus the previous year. |
| Pi Cycle proximity | 0.90 | 1.00 | 111DMA approaching or crossing 2x 350DMA is treated as a major top-risk configuration. |
| Funding / OI | rising | crowded | Hot positive funding and expanding open interest suggest crowded long leverage. |
The live score weights MVRV-Z 28%, NUPL 22%, Mayer 18%, Puell 12%, Pi Cycle proximity 12%, and derivatives crowding 8%. Historical replay uses the same weights and hard-flash rule. Because the committed history has no funding/OI series, derivatives heat is held at zero there; replay scores are lower bounds by at most 8 points.
The score maps to four public display states: Off, Watch, Elevated, and Flash. A hard flash can also occur when Pi Cycle crosses while the composite is already hot, or when MVRV-Z and NUPL both enter historical euphoria territory.
Glossary
Bitcoin cycle indicator glossary
Plain-language definitions of every indicator CryptoTIDE uses. Each term has a
stable anchor (for example methodology.html#mvrv-z) so it can be linked and cited
directly.
- TIDE
- A 0–1 Bitcoin bottom/valuation heat gauge that averages normalized valuation lenses (MVRV-Z, Mayer Multiple, Puell Multiple, log-regression quantile). Low values mean accumulation context; high values mean stretched valuation. Zones: Accumulation below 0.20, Early Accumulation below 0.40, Neutral below 0.60, Distribution below 0.80, Euphoria above 0.80.
- Cycle Compass (TIDE 2.0)
- CryptoTIDE's headline cycle read. It combines the post-halving clock (days since the last halving, the structural prior) with on-chain bottom and top-risk family evidence, producing an ordinal verdict and conviction rather than a point probability.
- MVRV Z-Score
- (market cap − realized cap) divided by the cumulative standard deviation of market cap. Historically high extremes have clustered near Bitcoin cycle peaks and low extremes near capitulation. CryptoTIDE computes it in-house from public CoinMetrics fields.
- Mayer Multiple
- Bitcoin price divided by its 200-day moving average. A simple gauge of whether price is stretched above or depressed below its long-term trend.
- Puell Multiple
- Daily Bitcoin issuance value in USD divided by its 365-day average. Gauges whether miner revenue is unusually weak or euphoric.
- NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss)
- The share of Bitcoin supply held in unrealized profit, computed as (market cap − realized cap) / market cap. High values mean many holders sit on large paper gains — a top-risk condition.
- Pi Cycle
- A Bitcoin top indicator based on the 111-day moving average approaching or crossing twice the 350-day moving average, historically a major-top configuration.
- Top-risk pressure
- A CryptoTIDE evidence gauge that rises when multiple top-risk families align. Public display states: Off, Watch, Elevated, Flash. It does not prescribe a portfolio action.
- Realized Price
- The aggregate on-chain cost basis of Bitcoin: realized capitalization divided by circulating supply — the average price at which the existing supply last moved on-chain. It acts as a cycle-scale support band; price trading below realized price has historically marked accumulation/capitulation context.
- Balanced Price
- A Glassnode-style Bitcoin fair-value floor model, computed as Realized Price minus Transferred Price (the lifetime average paid minus the lifetime average transferred). It has historically tracked the deepest cycle lows. CryptoTIDE sources it from CheckOnChain's public on-chain pricing chart (Glassnode-grade), falling back to realized price minus an anchored transferred price.
- Time-based capitulation
- A cycle-timing window that brackets when the cycle's deepest-value zone is historically due, using two independent Bitcoin rhythms. The early edge is ~365 days from the all-time high, counted inclusively (the ATH is day 1): the two prior cycles bottomed on inclusive day 364 (2017→2018) and 365 (2021→2022), so the 365th day after the 2025-10-06 ATH is the tight, best-fit near edge. The late edge follows Benjamin Cowen's “ROI from the cycle low” — prior bottoms landed roughly 1,424–1,432 days after the previous cycle low (2022-11-09). Together they yield a days-to-near-edge count and the expected window (early-to-mid October 2026). It is a historical rhythm, not a prediction.
Guardrails
What this is not
- Not financial advice.
- Not a personalized buy/sell recommendation.
- Not an auto-trading system.
- Not a guarantee that historical thresholds will work in the future.
- Not a copy of any private strategy or private data room.
CryptoTIDE shows public BTC cycle context. Markets are risky, the future can differ from past cycles, and each user is responsible for their own decisions.