MVRV Z-Score

The MVRV Z-Score chart plots the standardised gap between Bitcoin’s market cap and its realized cap on a linear right axis, with spot price muted on a log left axis for orientation. The pink band above +7 is the historical extreme-overvaluation zone; the sage band at or below +0.1 is the deep-bottom zone; horizontal reference lines mark both thresholds.

Today’s reading is +0.71, placing the network in the Undervalued regime. The companion raw MVRV sits at 1.401×, in line with the Z regime. The spot figure auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser; the Z series itself is recomputed nightly from the cohort data the data sources page documents.

The formula is the Awe & Wonder original:

Z = (Market Cap − Realized Cap) / Stdev(Market Cap)

The numerator is just the unrealised gap: how far above (or below) cost basis the network sits in dollar terms. The denominator is what gives the Z-score its cross-cycle bite — the expanding-window standard deviation of market cap, computed over every observation in the series up to and including today. The original Awe & Wonder series, and the popular dashboard reconstruction that propagated it, both use the expanding window rather than a rolling one. We follow that convention so the +7 / +0.1 reference lines remain comparable across cycles.

Why standardise? Raw MVRV is a unitless ratio, but its empirical thresholds drift. As Bitcoin’s realized cap matures, the same level of unrealised profit per realised dollar becomes harder to reach. The Z-score sidesteps that drift by translating the gap into the network’s own historical volatility units. A +7 print in 2017 (when stdev was ~$30B) and a +7 print in 2025 (when stdev is several hundred billion) both mean the same thing: an overvaluation seven standard deviations above the historical mean of market cap.

Our reconstruction caveat. btc oak does not have a per-UTXO last-spent price feed. We rebuild realized cap as a two-bucket weighted sum — STH supply × STH realized price plus LTH supply × LTH realized price. This approximation tracks per-UTXO ground-truth realized cap to within a few percent, which propagates to a sub-decimal-point shift in Z at typical reads. The full caveat lives on the methodology page.

The Z-score is most informative at extremes. The +7 band has only ever fired at blow-off tops (2011, 2013, 2017); the +0.1 band has bracketed every cycle bottom on the record. The middle zone — between roughly +0.1 and +5 — covers most days and carries weak signal on its own; pair the read with cohort-spread or cycle-shape indicators (SOPR, STH/LTH realized price, Reserve Risk) for context.

Reading every canonical cycle anchor against the live series surfaces both halves of the regime-decay pattern at once. Cycle peaks at +8.68, +7.98, +10.40, +6.90, +3.54, +2.97 — declining each cycle since 2017. Cycle troughs at −0.61, −0.46, −0.35 — also compressing each cycle, though more gently.

The cleanest way to see the regime shift on this chart is the per-cycle Z-score peak, in order. Pulling the maximum reading inside each cycle’s topping window from the live series:

Three of six cycle peaks on record cleared +7 — all of them in the pre-2018 era. Three did not. The April 2021 peak at +6.90 came within breathing distance of the ceiling but missed. November 2021 topped at +3.54, less than half the threshold. March 2024’s pre-halving high reached +2.97 — well into the mid-cycle band, despite printing a fresh all-time price high at $73,000. The trend is monotonic since 2017.

Two structural causes drive the decay. First, the denominator grows. The expanding stdev of market cap is computed over every observation since August 2011 — and as market cap balloons, so does its variance, faster than the numerator (the dollar gap) can keep pace. A market-cap-realized-cap gap of $1 trillion in 2025 maps to a smaller Z than a $200B gap mapped to in 2017, because the historical stdev anchor under each is wildly different.

Second, lost coins distort realized cap. Every Patoshi-era coin that has not moved since 2010 sits in the denominator at a near-zero per-coin valuation, biasing realized cap down. Chainalysis research has estimated 2.78 to 3.79 million BTC permanently lost; Sergio Demian Lerner’s Patoshi research identifies roughly 1.1 million Satoshi-era coins that have not moved since 2010 (recap on Yahoo Finance). The bias is one-directional: realized cap reads low, the numerator reads high, and Z reads — counter-intuitively — slightly high in absolute terms but slowly compressing in relative terms as the stdev catches up.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. Z at or below +0.1 — and especially negative readings — has fired at every cycle bottom on the record. Treat it as a high-conviction tactical accumulation signal. The 2015 trough at −0.61, 2018 at −0.46, 2020 Covid at −0.16, and 2022 FTX at −0.35 are all on the chart. Bottoms have shrunk somewhat (the negative depth is shallower in 2022 than in 2015), but the regime has fired every cycle.

For a cycle-timing trader. The +7 ceiling is no longer a working signal. The 2010s training-window thresholds describe the 2010s — for the 2020s, the +5 to +7 Overextended band is the new de-facto cycle-top range, and the November 2021 and March 2024 cycles topped well below even that. Pair Z with raw MVRV for a non-standardised comparison, and Reserve Risk for the long-term-holder conviction lens. Z alone is a slow signal — it moves on the order of weeks, not days.

For a researcher. The full Z series carries daily resolution since August 2011. The cohort-based realized-cap reconstruction, including the per-UTXO ground-truth gap, is documented on the methodology page.

The honest answer: no — but the threshold has drifted, and treating +7 as a current signal is a category error. The Z-score is doing exactly what it’s designed to do, which is express the gap between market and realized cap in standard-deviation units. What’s changed is the denominator’s scale, not the indicator’s integrity.

The denominator drift is structural. Awe & Wonder calibrated +7 against Bitcoin’s 2011–2018 history. In that era, market cap variance was dominated by 2013 and 2017 blow-off tops, so the stdev anchor was relatively small. Each additional bull cycle adds another extreme observation to the expanding window, enlarging stdev and lowering the Z-equivalent of any future gap. By March 2024 the stdev term was orders of magnitude larger than in late 2017.

The new working threshold is roughly +5. Five of the six modern peaks are at or above +3, and the April 2021 peak cleared +5 (topping at +6.90). The November 2021 and March 2024 peaks fell short — but those cycles also topped raw MVRV well below the historical 3.7 ceiling, so the shortfall is consistent across both metrics. Treating Z > +5 as “Overextended” rather than waiting for > +7 captures the modern shape of the cycle.

Realized cap inherits lost-coin distortion. The denominator includes every coin priced at the day it last moved — including Patoshi-era coins priced at near-zero. Both biases are one-directional and accumulate slowly. The bottom-side Z threshold (+0.1 / negative prints) has held up better than the top-side; the deep- bottom band has fired every cycle, including the gentle 2022 trough.

Our realized-cap reconstruction is not per-UTXO. btc oak builds the denominator from STH/LTH cohort series rather than per-UTXO last-spent prices. The approximation tracks ground truth within a few percent across the historical record; readings near the +0.1 threshold are the regimes most sensitive to the gap. Treat Z near a regime boundary as “within 0.05 of either side” rather than as a precise cross.

Canonical questions from Google’s “People also ask” block for bitcoin MVRV Z-score, answered against the data on this page.