Time in Band

Time in Band is the histogram cousin of the Rainbow chart. Each bar is one of the nine valuation bands; the bar's width is the share of historical days the network has spent inside that band, scaled against the most-lived-in band so the widest bar reads as full. Bars stack from band IX (Euphoric) at the top to band I (Capitulation) at the bottom, mirroring the Rainbow chart's vertical ordering.

Today Bitcoin sits in band III · Accumulation at $78,199.03. Over its 5,765 daily closes since first listed trade, the most-lived-in band is III · Accumulation, which has hosted 16.8% of the record. Spot auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser; the band assignments rebuild against the nightly Rainbow refit.

Three steps, all reproducible from public data:

centreLog(t) = a · ln(days_t) + b
logDev(t) = log10(price_t) − centreLog(t)
band(t) = bandIndex(logDev_t)

Step one: compute the regression centre at every historical day under today's Rainbow coefficients. Step two: subtract the centre log from the actual log-price to get the log-space deviation. Step three: bucket the deviation into one of nine bands using midpoint thresholds between the canonical −0.4, −0.3, ..., +0.3, +0.4 offsets. The result is one band index per daily close. The page then aggregates: the all-time histogram (every day since 18 July 2010), the current-cycle histogram (since the 2024 halving), and the per-cycle distribution table below (sliced at every halving block- confirmation date).

Reconstruction caveat. Because the bands are defined by the live Rainbow fit, every nightly refit shifts the per-band counts by a few days. The shape of the distribution is stable; the specific shares are not pinned to any historical fit. We render the live distribution rather than a historical snapshot so the lens tracks the current Rainbow on this site. Full derivation lives on the methodology page.

The headline shape is asymmetry. The lower bands (I-IV) host roughly half of every historical day; the upper bands (VII-IX) host roughly a quarter; band V and band VI together pick up the remainder. This is not a uniform 11%-per-band distribution, and it is not because Bitcoin's price spends equal time below and above trend. It is because the upper bands are exit ramps — rare, brief, late-cycle states that the chart visits and leaves. The lower bands are accumulation zones, and Bitcoin lives in them on average longer than it spends anywhere else.

Reading every cycle anchor against the live fit keeps the lens internally consistent across rows. Each cycle top has registered a lower band than the one before, the same compression visible on the Rainbow chart itself. The 2013 and 2017 peaks saturate band IX; the 2021 peaks sit in band IX at shallower offsets; the 2024 pre-halving high registers materially lower. Cycle troughs print symmetric pattern in the lower bands.

The page's distinctive contribution is the per-cycle band distribution. The pipeline ships the all-time aggregate plus the current-cycle counts; slicing every prior cycle into its own column shows where the headline narratives live. The clearest pattern is the steady erosion of the Euphoric band's frequency. Cycle II spent 26.4% of its days in band IX; Cycle III, 11.8%; Cycle IV, 12.6%; Cycle V to date, 0.0%. The same compression shows up on NUPL's “Euphoria” band, which is keyed off realized cap rather than log-regression — two different lenses converging on the same regime pattern.

Two patterns emerge. First: the lower bands (I-III) host a stable, even growing share of each cycle. Cycle II spent 45.4% in the accumulation zone; Cycle V to date sits at 12.2%. The accumulation zone has not gone away as the chart has matured.

Second: the Euphoric band has effectively disappeared from recent cycles. The mechanical explanation is the Rainbow regression itself: as more years of data arrive, the slope flattens slightly, and the upper band that hosted 2013-era and 2017-era prints sits further above today's price-level than it did in real time. A live-fit chart cannot help but discount the past's most extreme prints. The deeper question — is Bitcoin's per-cycle blow-off structurally smaller? — cannot be answered from this chart alone, but the pattern is consistent with the parallel evidence on NUPL, MVRV-Z, and Puell Multiple: the topping signals of the 2010s no longer fire on the same canonical thresholds.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. The asymmetry is doing the work for you. A steady weekly buy across the post-2015 history will have accumulated disproportionately in the lower bands, simply because that is where Bitcoin spends the bulk of its days. There is no need to time around the chart; the time-in-band distribution itself produces a buy schedule that's weighted toward accumulation by construction.

For a cycle-timing trader. Use Time in Band as a context lens, not an entry signal. A print in band VIII or IX is rare but says nothing about how long it will persist; the 2013 and 2017 cycles spent weeks in band IX before topping. Pair with Pi Cycle and MVRV-Z for cycle-position confirmation, and remember that the Euphoric band's frequency is dropping — do not size a trade for a 2017-style top in 2026.

For a researcher. The per-cycle table is the page's reproducible contribution: every band assignment is a function of the published Rainbow coefficients and the daily-close history. The four prior cycles each have closed boundaries; Cycle V is in progress, so its row grows by one day each refresh.

Lens-dependent. The bands are defined by the live Rainbow regression, which refits nightly. Every refit shifts each band's edges in log-space by a few hundredths, redistributing days near band boundaries. The total number of days in each band moves accordingly. Cross-cycle comparisons of the per-band counts are robust to trend; they are not pinned to a historical fit. Anyone wanting an absolutely stable distribution would have to pin the regression coefficients, sacrificing the “current Rainbow” promise of the chart.

Cycle boundaries are halving-day cuts. The cycle slices above use the canonical halving block-confirmation dates as edges. That is the most durable cycle landmark, but it is a choice — alternative slicings (top-to-top, low-to-low) would yield slightly different distributions. The halving cut is consistent with our halving-cycle overlay and is the cut most readers expect.

Pre-warmup days are excluded. The Rainbow regression starts after day-since-genesis 0; the very earliest 2010 trading rows are excluded from the histogram. The exclusion is small (about a dozen days) and does not move any per-cycle share by a meaningful amount, but it is a definitional choice the methodology page documents.

Backward-looking. Time in Band describes how often Bitcoin has visited each band; it cannot tell you how often it will visit each band in the future. The Euphoric-band shrinkage we document above is consistent with a maturing market — but a single late-cycle blow-off could reverse the pattern in a future cycle. The chart describes the record, not the regime ahead.

Canonical questions on Bitcoin time-in-band and Rainbow valuation, answered against the data on this page.