Net unrealized profit / loss

The line is NUPL, one reading a week, written as a share of bitcoin's market value. At 40%, two fifths of the market's value is profit its holders have not yet taken; below 0% the network as a whole holds its coins at a loss.

The chart names five zones, the metric's conventional reading: under 0% capitulation, 0 to 25% hope or fear, 25 to 50% optimism or anxiety, 50 to 75% belief or denial, and 75% and over euphoria or greed. The line is coloured by its value; the dashed green line is 0% and the dashed red line 75%, and the scale on the right reads the colour.

The chart opens on the last four years; the chips choose other windows or the whole record. Hovering shows the reading, its zone, the week and bitcoin's price then.

NUPL is market value minus realized value, divided by market value. Market value prices every bitcoin at today's price; realized value prices each at the price it last moved at, roughly what its holder paid. The difference is the paper profit or loss across the whole network, and dividing by market value turns it into a share. It carries the same information as MVRV in another form: NUPL is 1 − 1/MVRV.

Perly draws the series Bitview computes from a full bitcoin node, thinned to one reading a week.

The metric and its named zones come from Tuur Demeester and Adamant Capital, whose work on bitcoin's cycles popularised it, and they are credited under the chart. The zone names are a way of talking about a cycle, not a schedule it keeps.

Every cycle low from 2011 to 2022 took NUPL below zero, each less deeply than the one before. The peaks of 2013 and 2017 went into euphoria, above 75%; in 2021 NUPL peaked in February, just under that line, some nine months before the price's highest close.