NUPL

How to read it

NUPL expresses how much of Bitcoin's market value is unrealized profit. At 0.75 the market is sitting on enormous paper gains — historically a euphoric condition. Around 0 the average holder is break-even. Below 0, more value is held at a loss than a gain, which is what capitulation looks like in aggregate.

Price is plotted alongside it on the right-hand axis, because the reading matters most in context. NUPL near 0.75 while price makes new highs is the euphoric case the metric was built to flag; the same reading part-way through a recovery says something much milder. The deep troughs below 0 line up with the end of each bear market, when the average coin was held at a loss.

How it's calculated

Take market value minus realized value, then divide by market value. The result is the share of the market cap that exists only as unrealized profit.

What it did in past cycles

Both ends of the range have compressed toward the middle. At the cycle tops: 0.79 (2013-12-04), 0.77 (2017-12-16), 0.65 (2021-11-08), 0.56 (2025-10-06). At the bottoms: −0.77 (2015-01-14), −0.45 (2018-12-15), −0.33 (2022-11-09).

The negative troughs are the more reliable half of the record. Three times in Bitcoin's history the market as a whole has been sitting on a loss, and each time it marked the end of a bear market rather than the middle of one. At the June 2026 low NUPL read 0.09 — barely above break-even, but never negative, which is a materially different condition from 2015, 2018 or 2022.

What it doesn't tell you

It inherits every limitation of realized value, including wallet shuffles counting as cost-basis resets. It is also an average across all supply: a market where most holders are barely profitable and a few are enormously so can produce the same reading as one where everyone is modestly ahead.

Reading it against price is circular to a degree — NUPL is calculated from market value, so the two cannot diverge freely. The chart is for locating where in a cycle a reading occurred, not for treating NUPL as an independent confirmation of the price move.

And the 0.75 euphoria line has not been touched since 2013. Treating it as the definition of a top would have kept you invested through two of them.

Reading it with other metrics

NUPL and MVRV are algebraic restatements of each other. If you find yourself citing both, you are citing one fact twice.

The pairing that adds something is with realized price, which shows the same cost-basis idea split by cohort rather than averaged flat. NUPL near zero tells you the market is around break-even; the realized-price chart tells you who is underwater. Drawdown from ATH supplies the third dimension — how far the fall has gone in price terms, independent of anyone's cost basis.