Net Unrealized Profit / Loss

Net Unrealized Profit/Loss plots the gap between Bitcoin’s market cap and its realized cap, expressed as a fraction of market cap. The five coloured bands overlay are the cycle-watcher convention: deep teal at the bottom (Capitulation, NUPL < 0), warming through Hope/Fear, Optimism/Anxiety, Belief/Denial, and rust at the top (Euphoria/Greed, NUPL > 0.75). The line is bounded above by 1 and below by −1.

Today’s reading is +0.291, placing the network in the Optimism / Anxiety band. Spot is $78,199.03; realized cap currently sits at 70.9% of market cap. The spot figure auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser; NUPL itself is recomputed nightly.

The formula is short:

NUPL = (Market Cap − Realized Cap) / Market Cap

Market cap is the deterministic product of spot price and circulating supply; realized cap values each coin at the price it last moved on-chain. The Adamant Capital primer that introduced this construction in February 2019 published it as “Relative Unrealized P&L”; the “NUPL” abbreviation and the five-band naming crystallised in cycle-watcher publications afterward. The same authors (Tuur Demeester, Tamás Blummer, and Michiel Lescrauwaet) used three qualitative phases — greed, fear, capitulation/apathy — rather than the modern five-band ladder.

Algebraically NUPL is a monotonic transform of MVRV: NUPL = 1 − 1/MVRV. The two indicators carry the same information; NUPL’s 0-centred 0–1 frame is more legible than MVRV’s ratio scale, particularly in capitulation regimes where the values sign-flip clearly. The MVRV page carries the same realized-cap caveats and the per-cycle peak comparison.

btc oak reconstructs realized cap as a two-bucket weighted sum of short-term-holder and long-term-holder cohort series rather than from a per-UTXO last-spent-price feed; the gap is documented in the methodology and the upstream feed shape on sources.

The band names map onto a sentiment ladder, but the underlying mathematics is just paper-profit share. Negative values say the average coin is underwater; positive values say it is in profit. The thresholds at −0.25, 0, 0.25, 0.5, and 0.75 are cycle-watcher convention rather than authorial — the original Adamant primer named the regimes qualitatively without numeric boundaries. We carry the conventional bands because they are what every reader of this chart expects, with the caveat that they are empirical-historical rather than derived.

Reading every canonical cycle anchor against the live NUPL series surfaces the cycle decay cleanly. Cycle peaks: +0.83 (April 2013), +0.84 (November 2013), +0.79 (December 2017), +0.75 (April 2021, just touching), +0.66 (November 2021), +0.64 (March 2024). Cycle bottoms: −0.71 (January 2015), −0.43 (December 2018), −0.28 (November 2022). Both top and bottom extremes have been shrinking each cycle.

The headline observation on this chart is not the current reading — it is the way the bands have compressed cycle by cycle. Recompute the share of trading days each cycle spent in each band, under the conventional thresholds, and the pattern is unmistakable.

The Euphoria-band column is the most striking. In the first cycle on record, Bitcoin spent fourteen percent of all trading days above the 0.75 threshold — roughly one in seven days. In 2015–2018 that fell to under one percent. Since 2019 the band has not fired at all.

The Capitulation column has compressed similarly. The 2015–2018 cycle spent over a fifth of its days below zero; the current cycle has spent essentially none. The middle bands (Optimism/Anxiety and Belief/Denial) have absorbed both extremes — the 2023-onward cycle has spent over four-fifths of its days inside those two bands alone.

Two readings of this pattern are available. The first is structural: as Bitcoin has matured and ETF / institutional flows have damped peak-cycle euphoria and trough-cycle capitulation, the indicator’s extreme bands fire less often. The second is mechanical: lost coins growing as a share of issued supply slowly compress realized cap relative to circulating supply, biasing NUPL’s denominator. Both are real; both apply. Either way, the canonical cycle-watcher framing — “NUPL above 0.75 marks every cycle top” — no longer describes recent data. The 2021 cycle topped twice without the band firing, and the 2024 high has so far also stopped short.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. Treat NUPL < 0 as a tactical accumulation accelerator. The band has fired at every cycle bottom; even with the modern compression toward shallower bottoms, sub-zero NUPL has still bracketed the 2022 floor.

For a cycle-timing trader. The Euphoria band as a top signal has not fired in two cycles; do not size off it. The Belief/Denial band (0.25–0.5) is the modern de-facto cycle-top range; pair the read with MVRV-Z, SOPR, and Reserve Risk for the cycle-top read.

For a researcher. The methodology — including the realized-cap reconstruction caveat — is documented on the methodology page.

The Euphoria band has stopped firing. 2017 was the last time NUPL closed above 0.75 (peak +0.793 on 7 December 2017). Two cycle peaks since (April 2021 at 0.749, November 2021 at 0.659) have stayed below the band. The 2024 high topped at 0.640 — well inside the Belief/Denial range. A “wait for Euphoria” rule would have missed the entire 2021 cycle and is on track to miss this one.

NUPL is mathematically MVRV in costume. The relationship NUPL = 1 − 1/MVRV means the two indicators carry the same information. Pages and dashboards that display them as independent confirmations of one another are double-counting the same signal. Treat NUPL and MVRV as two views of one lens, not two lenses.

Realized cap inherits lost-coin distortion. 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 never moved since 2010 (recap on Yahoo Finance). Both categories sit in realized cap with near-zero per-coin valuations, biasing the denominator down and NUPL up. The effect is structural and one-directional, and accumulates slowly as a fraction of circulating supply.

The bands are convention, not theory. The 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 thresholds are not in the original Adamant Capital primer. They emerged from cycle-watcher publications and were anchored on the 2013 and 2017 peak readings. As those readings decay, the thresholds become harder to defend on first principles. Either Bitcoin is structurally different in the post-ETF era and the bands need recalibration, or the bands were always over-fit to two cycle samples — a small-sample-size critique most pages on this metric do not address.

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