MVRV Z-Score

The line is the MVRV Z-Score, one reading a week. Its colour follows its value: green below zero, grey through the middle, then amber, coral and crimson as it climbs. The dashed green line is zero, where market value equals realized value, and the dashed red line is 7. The colour bar on the right reads the line, and its marker sits at the latest reading.

Zero is the line that matters most. Below it bitcoin's market value is under its realized value — the price is under what the coins, on average, last changed hands for — and the chart calls the reading below the network's cost. From 0 to 3 it calls it mid-range, from 3 to 7 richly valued, and above 7 the historic top zone.

The chart opens on the last four years; the chips choose one, two or eight years, or the whole record back to 2011. Hovering shows the reading, its zone, the week and bitcoin's price then.

Market value is bitcoin's market capitalisation. Realized value, or realized cap, prices every coin at the price it last moved at rather than today's — roughly what its holders paid, added up. The gap between the two is the profit or loss sitting in the network, and the Z-Score divides it by the standard deviation of market value, so each cycle's gap is measured against how far the market has ever swung.

Perly reads the weekly market cap and realized cap from Bitview, an open-source indexer that computes them from a full bitcoin node, and scores each week against the standard deviation of every weekly market cap up to and including that week. A past week is never scored with hindsight. Not every site computes it that way: a deviation taken over the whole history, today's included, gives different numbers, most of all in the early years. The first year of readings is left out, because a deviation taken over a handful of weeks is tiny and would put the earliest scores far above every later top.

Every cycle low from 2011 to 2022 took the score below zero, and the peaks of 2013 and 2017 went past 7. In 2021 the score peaked in February, some nine months before the price's highest close in November — which is why the table lists the Z-Score's own extremes rather than its reading on the day of the price's top.

Levels such as 0 and 7 are landmarks read off a handful of cycles. The height each peak reached has differed from cycle to cycle, and nothing obliges the next one to reach any of them.