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 overlaid on the line are 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). Structurally the line is bounded above by +1 — the series opens near +1.00 in 2009 — but it has no symmetric floor: as market cap falls toward and below realized cap, NUPL can print under −1, as it did in the 2011 crash with a low near −1.5. Since 2012, though, the working range has been far narrower than the theoretical one, which is why the band thresholds were drawn where they are.

Today’s reading is +0.169, placing the network in the Hope / Fear band. Spot is $65,837.03; realized cap currently sits at 83.1% of market cap, which is the cost-basis cushion the network is carrying above water.

The construction is two terms over one:

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 exactly 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. That equivalence is also the indicator’s biggest trap — covered below. The MVRV page carries the same realized-cap caveats and the per-cycle peak comparison.

btc oak surfaces the upstream NUPL feed from CoinGlass’s net-unrealized-P&L series; the underlying realized cap is reconstructed from short-term-holder and long-term-holder cohorts 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 — there is no behavioural data inside the number, only price relative to cost basis. 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 explicit caveat that they are empirical-historical artefacts anchored on the 2013 and 2017 peaks, not first-principles cut-offs — which is exactly why they have aged badly.

Reading every canonical cycle anchor against the live NUPL series surfaces the cycle decay cleanly. The table below scores each cycle top and bottom on its anchor date — and the same pattern holds at both ends: peak readings step lower each cycle from the 2013 and 2017 highs down through the 2021 and 2024 tops, while the bottoms shoal upward from the deep 2015 print toward the much shallower 2022 floor. Both top and bottom extremes have shrunk cycle by cycle — there is no single counter-example in the record. The exact anchor-date figures are in the next exhibit; we let the table carry the numbers because every value is re-derived nightly from the live series.

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: both the top band and the bottom band are emptying out, and the middle is swelling.

The Euphoria-band column is the most striking. In the first cycle on record, Bitcoin spent about one in eight of all trading days above the 0.75 threshold — roughly twelve and a half percent. 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.

The Euphoria trigger has not armed since December 2017. NUPL peaked that cycle on 7 December 2017 at +0.793 and held in the band through 18 December 2017 — the last time it closed at or above 0.75. Every cycle peak since has stopped short of the band: the April 2021, November 2021, and March 2024 pre-halving highs all topped inside Belief/Denial below it (the exact anchor readings are in the cycle-history table and refit nightly). A “wait for Euphoria to sell” rule would have sat through both halves of the 2021 cycle and is on track to miss this one. This is the highest-stakes failure on the chart, because it is the exact rule most popular NUPL explainers still teach.

NUPL is MVRV in costume — do not double-count it. The identity NUPL = 1 − 1/MVRV means the two carry one signal, not two. Dashboards that show a green NUPL and a green MVRV as independent confirmations are confirming a number against itself. Treat them as one lens with two faces; reach for an orthogonal read — realised-price cohorts, SOPR, funding — when you want a second opinion.

Realized cap inherits lost-coin distortion, and it is one-directional. The millions of coins that are most likely lost — Satoshi-era Patoshi output prominent among the never-moved — are carried in realized cap at the price they last changed hands, which for 2010 coins is effectively zero. That biases the denominator down and NUPL up — a slow, structural drift that makes today’s readings faintly hotter than a clean per-UTXO cap would show, and erodes the very thresholds the bands depend on.

The bands are over-fit to two cycle samples. The 0, 0.25, 0.5, 0.75 thresholds are not in the original Adamant Capital primer; they were anchored on the 2013 and 2017 peak readings and then frozen. As those readings decay, the cut-offs 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 a sample of two — a small-sample critique most pages on this metric never raise. The honest conclusion is to watch the trajectory of each cycle’s extreme rather than waiting for a fixed line that history is steadily walking away from.

If you accumulate on a schedule, treat NUPL < 0 as a tactical accumulation accelerator. The band has fired at every cycle bottom on record; even with the modern compression toward shallower troughs, sub-zero NUPL still bracketed the 2022 floor (which dipped to roughly −0.32 intra-cycle, with the post-FTX anchor close near −0.28). The bottom side of the indicator has held up far better than the top side.

If you are trying to time the cycle, do not size off the Euphoria band — it has not fired in two cycles and may not fire in this one. The Belief/Denial band (0.5–0.75) is the modern de-facto cycle-top range — every recent top stalled there — but it is too wide to trade alone. Pair the read with MVRV-Z for a volatility-standardised trigger, and Reserve Risk to separate accumulation from distribution. What NUPL gives you on its own is the direction of travel: each cycle’s extreme is shallower than the last, so anchoring a sell plan to a previous cycle’s reading is the one move the data actively argues against.