What the Realized Price is
The Realized Price is the aggregate cost basis of the entire Bitcoin supply, expressed per coin. It answers one question: taking every bitcoin that exists and the market price at the moment it last moved on the blockchain, what is the volume-weighted average? As of 22 September 2026 that figure is about 53,400 US dollars, while the market price is around 86,000 dollars. The live value with its 30-day range sits in the on-chain section of the Bitcoin page.
One word in that definition carries the whole caveat: moved. The ledger records when a coin last changed hands on-chain and how much moved. It does not record a price at all; that comes from an external BTC/USD history matched to the date of the move, and it is the market price of that day, not what anyone paid. If you bought on an exchange and the coins never left the exchange's wallets, your purchase is invisible to the chain; those coins carry the price of the day the exchange last moved them on-chain between its own wallets. Realized Price is therefore a volume-weighted proxy for what holders paid, built from on-chain movement dates and market prices, and this guide uses "cost basis" in that sense throughout.
Its bigger sibling is the Realized Cap: the same idea in total rather than per coin, currently about 1.07 trillion dollars against a conventional market cap of roughly 1.73 trillion. Realized Price is simply Realized Cap divided by circulating supply.
Both numbers exist because Bitcoin's ledger records when each coin last changed hands on-chain, and a public price history supplies what the market paid that day. No other major asset class publishes anything comparable. For stocks you can look up the last trade; you cannot look up when every share in the register last moved. For bitcoin you can, and this guide walks through how.
How Realized Cap is calculated
Bitcoin stores value as unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs), each with an amount and the block in which it was created. The on-chain basics guide explains the model; here is the arithmetic.
- Take every UTXO in the current set. In September 2026 that is roughly 165 million outputs.
- Look up the BTC/USD price on the day each output was created.
- Multiply amount by that historical price. This is the output's realized value.
- Sum all realized values. That sum is the Realized Cap.
- Divide by supply (about 20.09 million BTC). That is the Realized Price.
A worked example with three outputs makes the logic visible:
| Output | Amount | Created | Price that day | Realized value |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A | 1.0 BTC | June 2013 | $100 | $100 |
| B | 1.0 BTC | January 2021 | $30,000 | $30,000 |
| C | 1.0 BTC | September 2026 | $86,000 | $86,000 |
| Total | 3.0 BTC | $116,100 |
Realized Cap for this tiny network is 116,100 dollars. Realized Price is 116,100 divided by 3, about 38,700 dollars. Market cap at today's price would be 258,000 dollars. The gap between the two is the network's unrealised gain on paper, and it is the raw material for the MVRV ratio and NUPL, covered in their own guides.
Market price vs. Realized Price
Market price is set at the margin: the last trade on the most liquid exchanges. It moves every second and reflects only the coins being traded right now. Realized Price moves slowly because most of the supply does not move. About 12.7 million of the 20.09 million BTC, roughly 63 percent, have not changed hands on-chain in over a year. Those coins keep their old price tags in the Realized Cap until they move.
That inertia is what makes the metric useful as a reference line. Here is how the two have compared at the start of recent years, computed from the full Bitcoin Research Kit series:
| Date | Market price | Realized Price | Market ÷ Realized |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Jan 2019 | $3,833 | $4,536 | 0.85 |
| 1 Jan 2021 | $29,311 | $9,293 | 3.15 |
| 1 Jan 2022 | $47,332 | $24,474 | 1.93 |
| 1 Jan 2023 | $16,595 | $19,758 | 0.84 |
| 1 Jan 2024 | $43,740 | $21,932 | 1.99 |
| 1 Jan 2025 | $94,461 | $41,013 | 2.30 |
| 1 Jan 2026 | $88,449 | $56,080 | 1.58 |
Two things stand out. The Realized Price rose from about 4,500 dollars at the start of 2019 to about 56,000 at the start of 2026, and it did so even in a year when the market price fell: between 1 January 2025 and 1 January 2026 the market price dropped from 94,461 to 88,449 while the Realized Price climbed from 41,013 to 56,080. Coins bought at higher prices were moving on-chain and replacing older, cheaper price tags. The rise was not uninterrupted, though. In the year-start table above the Realized Price is lower only once, on 1 January 2023, and the full daily series shows why: it peaked at 24,610 dollars on 21 April 2022 and slid to 19,680 on 11 January 2023, a drop of about 20 percent while the market price fell by more than half over the same span. Large amounts of high-cost supply were sold at a loss and re-tagged lower. Smaller pullbacks of five to seven percent occurred in 2019, 2020, 2021 and again since the November 2025 peak; the 2022 episode is the only one of that depth since 2019.
When the market price was below the Realized Price
A market price below the Realized Price means the average coin, weighted by amount, is held at an unrealised loss. Since 2011 that has been true on about 13 percent of all days. Since 2019 it has been rarer: roughly 10 percent of days. The episodes since 2018, from the BRK daily series, grouped as calendar stretches in which the ratio was below 1 on most days (single days above 1 inside a stretch are noted, not glossed over):
- 21 November 2018 to 1 April 2019 (132 consecutive days, no interruption). Lowest ratio 0.70 on 14 December 2018: price 3,218 dollars against a Realized Price of 4,617.
- March 2020 (six daily readings below 1 around the COVID sell-off, but not six days in a row: 12 March, then 14 to 18 March, with 13 March just above 1 at 1.002). Lowest ratio 0.90 on 16 March: price 5,009 dollars, Realized Price 5,566.
- 13 June 2022 to 12 January 2023 (180 days below 1 in total, in five runs of 36, 2, 22, 52 and 68 days, separated by short recoveries). Lowest ratio 0.75 on 9 November 2022: price 15,729 dollars against a Realized Price of 20,906. 15,729 divided by 20,906 is 0.752, which is the division from two sections up.
These are descriptions of what the ledger showed on those dates. Each episode had a different length, a different depth and a different macro backdrop. The one thing they share is arithmetic: the average holder was underwater. What happened afterwards in each case is history, not a rule about what happens next time.
Variants you will come across
Once you have the per-UTXO cost basis, you can slice it. Analysts commonly split by coin age:
- Long-term holder Realized Price: cost basis of coins that have not moved for more than 155 days. Currently about 16.6 million BTC fall into this bucket.
- Short-term holder Realized Price: cost basis of the coins that moved within the last 155 days. It tracks the market price much more closely, because these coins were priced recently.
- Age-band Realized Prices: cost basis of coins that last moved one to two years ago, two to three years ago, and so on.
CoinVett shows the network-wide Realized Price, not the cohort splits. The cohort figures are useful in research contexts but multiply the number of lines on a chart without changing what the data fundamentally can and cannot say.
Known distortions in the number
Realized Price is a clean calculation on messy inputs. Four things to keep in mind:
Lost coins. An estimated few million BTC from the early years will never move. They sit in the Realized Cap at prices of a few dollars or less, pulling the Realized Price down permanently. Nobody "holds" those coins at that cost basis in any meaningful sense.
Custodial reshuffles. When an exchange or ETF custodian consolidates wallets, the moved coins are re-tagged at today's price even though no customer bought or sold anything. Large custodians can shift the Realized Cap by tens of billions in a single week for purely operational reasons.
Change outputs. When you spend part of a UTXO, the remainder comes back to you as a new output with today's price tag. Your own cost basis has not changed; the ledger's version of it has.
Price source. The historical price used for each output comes from a daily series. Different providers use different exchange baskets, especially for the years before 2013, so Realized Cap figures differ slightly between Glassnode, Coin Metrics and the Bitcoin Research Kit. The direction and shape are the same; the third decimal is not.
What the Realized Price cannot tell you
- It is not a floor and not a target. The market price has spent months at a time below it and years above it. The metric describes the average cost basis; it does not exert force on the price.
- It says nothing about your own position. Your cost basis is what you paid. The network's aggregate figure has no bearing on it.
- It does not measure intent. A coin re-tagged at today's price might be a purchase, a custodial transfer, a change output or a wallet migration. The ledger does not know.
- It does not forecast. Every input is a past block and a past price. The number is a snapshot of the ledger as of the last computed day.
- It does not define what a bitcoin ought to cost. The data contains a cost basis and a market price, plus the ratio between them (which is what MVRV reports). Any notion of a correct or deserved price is added by the reader, not by the ledger.
Read it as a statement about the past: this is what the supply last changed hands for. Nothing more is in the number.
Frequently asked questions
Why did the Realized Price keep rising while the market fell?
Because Realized Price only changes when coins move, and what matters is the old price tag versus the new one, not what the current owner paid. Take a coin that last moved on-chain in 2020 and carries a 5,000-dollar tag. Its owner may have bought it at 60,000 on an exchange in 2021 without ever withdrawing it; the chain does not know that. If that coin now moves while the market is at 40,000, its tag jumps from 5,000 to 40,000. The owner has lost 20,000 dollars on the trade. The aggregate cost basis has gone up by 35,000 dollars for that coin. This is what happened between November 2021 and April 2022: the market price fell from about 64,600 to 40,300 dollars, yet the Realized Price rose from 23,782 to 24,610, because the coins that moved carried tags far below 40,000. It only started falling in mid-2022, once coins tagged near the 2021 and early-2022 highs were themselves moved at lower prices.
Is the Realized Price the average buy price of all holders?
No. It is the average on-chain transfer price: the market price at the moment each coin last moved on the blockchain. That overlaps with purchase price but is not the same thing. Coins bought on an exchange and never withdrawn carry the price of the day the exchange last shuffled them on-chain between its own wallets, not the buyer's price. Coins moved between your own wallets get today's tag without any purchase. Coins lost in 2011 keep a tag of a few dollars forever. The Realized Price is the best public proxy for what holders paid, and it is exactly that: a proxy.
Where does CoinVett's number come from?
From the Bitcoin Research Kit running against a full node CoinVett operates. If that node is down, the public instance of the same open-source software at bitview.space is used, and the source label next to the figure says so. The methodology page documents the sync schedule and staleness handling.
Source and notice: Bitcoin Research Kit (own full node; public instance bitview.space as fallback, source shown per measurement). Historical values computed from the BRK daily series as of 22 September 2026. These figures are descriptions of historical on-chain data, not a valuation or a recommendation. Nothing on this page is investment advice.