Where Our Numbers Come From

Every chart on this site is generated from public data by code, rebuilt daily, and published alongside the CSV it was drawn from. This page sets out where each series comes from, how current it is, and what is known to be wrong with it.

It exists because a site whose argument is "you can check this" has to make checking possible.

The sources

Price history. Daily closes, from two series. Most price charts use a long-running daily BTC-USD series that begins in September 2014. Charts that need more history — the on-chain metrics, which start in 2010 — use Coin Metrics' Community API price series instead, so the price line and the metric line cover the same span. The two are not spliced; each chart states which it uses.

On-chain metrics. MVRV, NUPL, SOPR, realized price, hashrate, coin-days destroyed, liveliness, HODL waves and the rest come from bitcoin-data.com, with market capitalisation and realized-value series from Coin Metrics. These are computed by the vendor from the chain, not by us.

Macro. US public debt from the US Treasury's daily "Debt to the Penny" series. US M2 from the Federal Reserve via FRED. Government debt and GDP by country from the IMF.

Comparison assets. Gold and silver spot, the S&P 500, and the fork assets, from daily market-data feeds.

How current it is

The site rebuilds once a day. That is the honest cadence for the data: on-chain metrics publish daily, M2 monthly, IMF figures annually. Presenting any of it as real-time would be a false precision.

Upstream vendors refresh individual series on a rotation, so a chart built today can legitimately end several days ago. Rather than stamp the build date on everything, each chart shows the date of its own last data point — a chart that says "data to" a date three days back is telling you the truth about its source, not showing a stale page.

The one genuinely intraday number is the price on the homepage, which is fetched in your browser from a public price feed. Every other figure is as of the build.

What is known to be wrong with it

These are the limitations that affect conclusions, not a disclaimer.

On-chain cost basis is an approximation. Every metric derived from realized value treats a coin's last on-chain movement as a purchase. Wallet shuffles reset it without a trade; exchange-internal and ETF trading never touch the chain at all; lost coins keep a decade-old price forever. The gap between "what the chain records" and "what holders paid" has almost certainly widened as custodial holdings have grown.

Debt figures differ between sources, legitimately. The US Treasury total includes intragovernmental holdings; the IMF measure excludes them. Both are correct for their own purpose and the two must not be spliced. Our US debt pages use the Treasury series and our world debt pages use the IMF one, and each says so.

World debt coverage grows over time. The IMF series covers roughly 88 countries and the number has increased, so part of the apparent growth in the world aggregate is simply more countries reporting. It is also converted to US dollars, which means a strengthening dollar shrinks the total without anything being repaid.

Some series are short. Funding rate begins in July 2023 and Fear & Greed in February 2018. Neither has observed a full cycle in the way the on-chain metrics have, and their pages say so rather than quietly presenting partial history as complete.

Fork data has no volume. The upstream fetcher stores OHLC only, so an illiquid market and an active one are indistinguishable on the forks page. That matters most for Bitcoin Gold, whose volatility figure is measuring the absence of trading.

What we deliberately do not publish

Lag-offset money-supply charts. The popular version shifts M2 forward by ten to fifteen weeks until the lines agree, and no two publishers use the same offset. The full argument is here.

A global M2 composite. Several countries' M2 series were discontinued years ago — the euro area's in 2017, Japan's in 2017, China's in 2019 — so a recent "global M2" line is reconstructed from sources that no longer report on a common basis. We chart US M2, which is live and consistently defined.

Price targets. The cycle page carries a projection because it is the honest historical analogue of what previous cycles did, and it is labelled naïve on the chart itself. Nothing here is a forecast.

Checking it yourself

Every chart page has a download link beneath it that returns the exact series the chart was drawn from, in CSV. If a figure on this site looks wrong, that file is the fastest way to settle it — corrections are welcome, and they are the messages we act on fastest.

Last updated 2026-08-10.