Bitcoin Volatility

Annualised realized volatility over 30 and 90 days, back to 2012. The long-run trend is down: about 110% in 2013, roughly 41% in 2025.

Data to 2026-09-19. On-chain metrics are fetched on a rotation, so this can trail the build by a few days.

How to read it

Realized volatility measures how much price has actually moved, annualised so the number is comparable with other assets. The striking feature is the trend: mean 30-day volatility has fallen from around 110% in 2013 to roughly 41% in 2025. Bitcoin remains far more volatile than equities, but markedly less so than it was.

How it's calculated

The standard deviation of daily logarithmic returns over the trailing window, multiplied by the square root of 365 to annualise.

What it did in past cycles

Mean and maximum 30-day realized volatility, by calendar year:

Year	Mean 30d	Max 30d
2012	77.7%	267.2%
2013	110.3%	360.3%
2014	75.5%	221.8%
2015	62.3%	168.5%
2016	42.7%	97.6%
2017	84.2%	150.6%
2018	80.9%	154.7%
2019	68.6%	136.1%
2020	68.9%	214.3%
2021	76.3%	118.7%
2022	63.5%	102.6%
2023	41.5%	74.4%
2024	49.3%	77.8%
2025	40.8%	69.1%

The clearest cut of the same data is the reading at each cycle top: 168.3% (2013-12-04), 109.3% (2017-12-16), 54.7% (2021-11-08), 27.5% (2025-10-06). Bitcoin peaked in October 2025 at a 30-day volatility of 27.5% — a quarter of 2013's annual mean, and lower than the calmest full year on this table.

The maximum column matters as much as the mean. A 360% annualised reading, as in May 2013, describes an asset moving several percent a day for a month; nothing since 2020 has come close to that.

What it doesn't tell you

Realized volatility is backward-looking — it says what happened, not what will. It is also direction-blind: a violent rally and a crash of equal magnitude produce identical readings. The declining trend is a description of the past, not a guarantee that maturation continues.

The decline is also not monotonic, and the table above is the evidence: 2017 was more volatile than 2016, 2021 more than 2019, 2024 more than 2023. The trend is real over a decade and unreliable over any two adjacent years.

Reading it with other metrics

Drawdown from ATH is the tail-risk counterpart — volatility describes the typical day, drawdown the worst outcome, and both have moderated.

Bitcoin vs gold and Bitcoin vs the S&P 500 are the relevant comparisons for whether the remaining volatility is tolerable, since relative performance without relative risk is only half the argument. Funding rate is worth watching when volatility compresses, since quiet levered markets are how cascades start.