The Bitcoin Rainbow Chart

The Bitcoin Rainbow Chart plots every Bitcoin daily close since 18 July 2010 on a logarithmic price axis, overlaid with an ordinary-least-squares regression of log₁₀(price) on ln(days since genesis). That fit is the centre line. Eight parallel offsets — fixed at 0.1 log₁₀ intervals above and below it — split the plot into nine coloured bands, each a 10^0.1 ≈ 1.26× multiplier of the one beneath. The gradient runs cool-to-warm: cool bands sit below trend, the centre band tracks the regression median, warm bands mark increasingly speculative territory.

Today’s reading places Bitcoin at $78,199.03 against a centre-line estimate of $129,598.30 — a deviation of −39.7%. That puts the network in Accumulation, band 3 of nine. The spot figure auto-refreshes a few times a day in the browser; the regression coefficients refit overnight, and the band assignments in the table below reflect the current fit, not the fit that was live on the historical date.

The inputs are a single series: every Bitcoin daily close in USD (provenance documented on the data sources page), matched to the deterministic day-count from the Bitcoin genesis block on 2009-01-03. The regression is:

log₁₀(price_i) = a · ln(days_i) + b + ε_i

Fit by OLS on all 5,765 observations. Today’s coefficients are a = 2.4649, b = -16.4616, with R² = 0.9612. The nine bands are the centre line shifted by -0.4, -0.3, -0.2, -0.1, 0.0, 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 in log₁₀ space. Band assignment at any date t is the sign and magnitude of log₁₀(priceₜ) − (a · ln(daysₜ) + b), bucketed at the midpoints between successive band offsets.

Two choices are worth flagging. First, the regression refits every night, so the centre line and the band boundaries shift a little each day as new closes arrive — every snapshot states the fit it used. Second, days are counted from genesis (2009-01-03), not from the first-traded date (2010-07-18), so the ln(days) axis tracks Bitcoin’s protocol history rather than its price history. Both conventions match Blockchain Center’s canonical Rainbow; the full derivation lives on the methodology page.

Locate spot on the price axis, read across to today’s centre line, and note the log-space offset. Negative offsets put Bitcoin below the regression median in the cool bands (I to IV) — historically the territory of cycle bottoms and multi-year accumulation. Positive offsets push it above, into the warm bands (VI to IX), where past cycle tops and distribution phases have lived. Band V straddles the centre line: the model’s “no strong view” regime.

Applying today’s fit to every Bitcoin cycle extremum since 2013 surfaces a clear pattern. The 2013 and 2017 peaks saturate band IX (Euphoric); the 2021 peaks sit in band IX but at shallower log-space offsets; the 2024 pre-halving high registers only in band 6. Each top has landed lower than the last. Prices are our own daily closes; band assignment uses the coefficients above.

The cleanest way to see it: log-space deviation at the four cycle tops.

• 04 Dec 2013 — spot $1,121.48, centre $102.01, log-space offset +1.04 (Euphoric).
• 17 Dec 2017 — spot $19,423.58, centre $3,059.72, log-space offset +0.80 (Euphoric).
• 10 Nov 2021 — spot $67,145.37, centre $23,808.28, log-space offset +0.45 (Euphoric).
• 14 Mar 2024 — spot $73,097.77, centre $61,543.86, log-space offset +0.07 (Elevated).

Log-space offset is a regression-scale invariant: when the slope flattens, the band boundaries flatten with it, so a constant offset would yield the same band reading cycle after cycle. The peaks above are not constant — they are falling. Every cycle top has been less extreme, per Rainbow, than the one before it. That single observation is what most Rainbow hosts leave off the page.

Under the current fit, every historical day is assigned the band it would sit in today. The distribution is asymmetric by design, and in practice more so than a flat 11%-per-band split: Bitcoin spends multi-year stretches in the lower bands and only brief windows in the upper ones.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. Treat the lower four bands as your accumulation range and the middle three as your hold range. There is no need to time around the chart; the asymmetry of time-in-band above does the work for you — a steady weekly buy will disproportionately accumulate in bands I – IV simply because that is where Bitcoin spends most of its days.

For a cycle-timing trader. Pair the Rainbow with at least two of Pi Cycle, Puell, MVRV‑Z, and the 200-week MA. The Rainbow alone is a slow, smooth signal — bands move on the order of weeks. Corroborating regime tools give you a tighter entry/exit window than the chart can produce on its own. And given the peak compression documented above, do not expect the current cycle to reach the same band a previous one did.

For a researcher. Every number on this page is reproducible from the daily-close history under the current fit. The coefficients, band offsets, and genesis-day convention are documented in the methodology.

The regression slope flattens over time. Held static, the fit over-forecasts every future period — a 2018-vintage Rainbow would have the 2024 top in band IX, not band 6. Nightly refitting fixes the forward bias and imposes a backward one: historical peaks look more extreme than they did in real time, because the current fit is shallower than the one that was live on the day. Both biases are real. Both are the model’s shape, not its failure.

The bands are descriptive, not predictive. Trolololo introduced the underlying regression in his 2014 BitcoinTalk thread with an explicit caveat — “just a model, not a crystal ball” — and Blockchain Center, who hosts the canonical version, frames it as a long-run reference rather than a forecasting tool. The bands are regions on a log-regression plot. They do not imply mean reversion, and they do not imply that a reading inside a band will produce the return a past reading in that band produced.

It is one of many power-law-family models. The broader critique of log-regression fits on Bitcoin — laid out by Nico Cordeiro in his 2020 CoinDesk essay on stock-to-flow, and revisited in Giovanni Santostasi’s Power-Law Theory write-up — applies here. Bitcoin’s long-run price may or may not follow a power law; the Rainbow implicitly assumes it does.

For a cleaner view of the same underlying shape with explicit confidence intervals rather than fixed log-offsets, see the Power-Law Corridor.

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