MVRV Ratio

The MVRV chart plots the ratio of Bitcoin’s market capitalisation to its realized capitalisation on a linear right axis, with spot price muted on a logarithmic left axis for orientation. The amber band between 2.4 and 3.7 marks the conventional “extended” range; the rust band above 3.7 is the original cycle-top zone; the sage band below 1.0 is the “underwater” range that has bracketed every cycle bottom on the daily-close record. Read the two axes together and the ratio is a cleaner cycle-locator than price alone: spot tells you where the market is, MVRV tells you how far the market has run ahead of — or behind — what holders actually paid.

Today’s reading is 1.189×, placing the network in the Fair-to-elevated regime. Market cap is $1273.34B; realized cap is $1071.03B.

The formula is short, but the denominator is where the interesting choices live:

MVRV = Market Cap / Realized Cap

Market cap is the deterministic product of spot price and circulating supply (the latter from the canonical halving schedule, including any coins long since lost). Realized cap values each unspent transaction output at the price on the day it last moved — the framework Nic Carter and Antoine Le Calvez introduced at the Baltic Honeybadger 2018 conference on 23 September 2018, building on a suggestion from Pierre Rochard.

Murad Mahmudov and David Puell took realized cap as a denominator in their October 2018 essay, and the resulting ratio is what we publish here.

Our reconstruction caveat. btc oak does not have a per-UTXO last-spent price feed. Instead we rebuild realized cap as a two-bucket weighted sum:

Realized Cap ≈ STH supply × STH realized price + LTH supply × LTH realized price

This approximation tracks the per-UTXO ground-truth realized cap to within a few percent across the full history; the gap is documented in the methodology page. We flag it on every realized-cap-family page rather than hiding it in fine print, because it matters: a per-UTXO ground truth would shift today’s MVRV print by roughly a percent or two — a meaningful margin in regimes near the 1.0 or 3.7 thresholds, but not at typical mid-cycle reads.

MVRV is most informative at the extremes. Sustained sub-1 readings have only fired at cycle bottoms — the regime where the average coin on the network is underwater is statistically rare, compresses sellers, and historically marks the start of recovery. Sustained readings above 3.7 have only fired at the 2013 and 2017 cycle peaks; the original framework anchored that ceiling on those two cycles, and it has not fired since. Between 1 and 3.7 covers roughly four-fifths of all trading days and carries weak signal on its own — pair the read with the standardised MVRV-Z or a cohort-spread indicator.

Reading every canonical cycle anchor against the live series surfaces the regime-decay pattern with no further commentary needed. Cycle peaks at 5.63×, 5.39×, 5.11×, 3.94×, 2.93×, 2.76×. Cycle troughs at 0.54×, 0.69×, ~0.75×. Both extremes shrinking each cycle, with remarkable regularity. Prices are our own daily closes; the MVRV column is the value on the named date or the most recent prior reading — note the 2022 anchor reads the post-FTX rebound date rather than the cycle low of ~0.75 a fortnight earlier.

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

Three of six cycle peaks on record fired the 3.7 ceiling — all of them in the pre-2018 era. Three did not. The early-2021 peak at 3.94 — reached in February, not at the April price high — was the only post-2017 reading inside the topping zone, and even that print sat closer to the 2.4 lower-bound than the 5+ readings of 2013 and 2017. The November 2021 peak at 2.93 fell short by almost a full unit. The March 2024 pre-halving high at 2.76 fell short by a full 0.94. The trend is monotonic.

Two structural causes drive the decay. First, lost coins have grown as a share of issued supply: every Patoshi-era coin that has not moved since 2010 sits in realized cap with a near-zero per-coin valuation, biasing the denominator down. The several million coins now considered permanently lost never leave that denominator, so the distortion only deepens as the float ages. Second, the market has matured: institutional inflows damp peak-cycle euphoria, and the same blow-off shape that produced 5×+ MVRV reads in 2013 and 2017 simply does not characterise the 2021 or 2024 cycles.

A practical corollary: a “wait for MVRV ≥ 3.7” rule would have missed the entirety of the 2021 cycle and is currently on track to miss this one. The thresholds Mahmudov and Puell anchored on 2010s data describe the 2010s. For the 2020s, the Extended band (2.4–3.7) is the new de-facto cycle-top range.

December 2017 was the last time the 3.7 ceiling fired. Three of six cycle peaks cleared it: April 2013 at 5.63, November 2013 at 5.39, December 2017 at 5.11. Every peak since has fallen short — February 2021 at 3.94 (the lone post-2017 incursion, and even then a brief incursion of a few days rather than the multi-week stays of 2013 and 2017), November 2021 at 2.93, March 2024 at 2.76. A literal “wait for 3.7” sell rule would have held through both 2021 tops and is on track to hold through this cycle. The threshold was a property of the 2013 and 2017 blow-offs, not a constant of the network.

The bottoms have drifted up the same way. The January 2015 trough hit 0.54 and the December 2018 trough 0.69, both deep in the “deep capitulation” band. The November 2022 post-FTX low — the most violent solvency shock in the asset’s history — bottomed near 0.75, roughly a quarter under cost basis and still inside the deep-capitulation band, though far shallower than the 2015 and 2018 floors. A “wait for sub-0.6” accumulation rule that worked beautifully in 2015 and 2018 has not triggered once since. The extremes are compressing from both ends, so any fixed threshold inherited from an earlier cycle is mis-calibrated for the next.

Realized cap inherits lost-coin distortion. The denominator prices every coin at the day it last moved — including Patoshi-era coins valued near $0 and a long tail of coins dormant since the early 2010s. The bias is one-directional: realized cap reads lower than an “active-float” realized cap would, so MVRV reads higher. This is structural, not stochastic, and accumulates with circulating supply — part of why each cycle’s peak multiple is mechanically harder to reach than the last.

Our reconstruction is cohort-based, not per-UTXO. btc oak builds the denominator from STH/LTH cohort series rather than from per-UTXO last-spent prices. The approximation tracks ground truth within a few percent across the record, but the regimes most sensitive to that gap are exactly the ones that matter — readings near 1.0 or 3.7. Treat MVRV within 0.05 of a regime boundary as “at the boundary,” not as a clean cross. Cohort migration adds a second wrinkle: coins ageing past 155 days into the LTH bucket lift LTH realized price mechanically, nudging the denominator up and MVRV down in strong bull regimes — usually negligible against the cycle-decay signal, but worth flagging near a threshold.

If you accumulate sub-1, you are still early — but adjust the depth. MVRV below 1 has fired at every cycle bottom on record and remains a strong tactical accumulation signal. The catch is depth: the modern bottoms have not gone to 0.5–0.6, so a “wait for sub-0.8” rule risks never triggering. Treat any sustained sub-1 print as the accumulation accelerator, not the deep prints of last decade.

If you are timing the cycle, read the Extended band, not 3.7. The 2.4–3.7 range is the modern de-facto cycle-top zone. Pair MVRV with the standardised MVRV-Z, which rescales the ratio by its own volatility and so partly absorbs the lost-coin drift, and with SOPR for the realised-profit cohort spread. MVRV alone moves on the order of weeks, not days, and the one forecast this chart actively argues against is that the next top reaches the multiple a previous one did.