What NUPL is
NUPL is short for Net Unrealized Profit/Loss. It measures how much of Bitcoin's current market value is gain that holders have on paper but have not sold. A NUPL of 0.38, the reading on 22 September 2026, means that about 38 percent of the market capitalisation is unrealised profit: the supply is worth 1.73 trillion dollars today and last changed hands on-chain for about 1.07 trillion, so the difference of roughly 0.66 trillion is 38 percent of the current value.
NUPL is the third of the four on-chain figures in the Bitcoin page's on-chain section, shown with its 30-day range. Of the four, it is the one with the most intuitive reading: a share of the pie that is paper gain. That intuition is also why it gets dressed up with more emotional labels than any other metric, which this guide will get to.
How NUPL is calculated
The formula: NUPL = (Market Cap − Realized Cap) ÷ Market Cap.
Market Cap is price times supply. Realized Cap is every unspent output valued at the price of the day it was created, summed; it is the network's aggregate cost basis, explained step by step in the Realized Price guide. The numerator, Market Cap minus Realized Cap, is the total unrealised gain (or loss, if negative) across all coins. Dividing by Market Cap expresses it as a fraction of today's value.
With the September 2026 figures: (1.73 − 1.07) ÷ 1.73 ≈ 0.38.
The ratio has a fixed ceiling and no floor. NUPL reaches exactly 1 only if Realized Cap is zero, meaning every coin in existence was last moved at a price of zero; the entire market value would then be paper gain. Going above 1 would require a negative Realized Cap, and a sum of amounts times prices cannot be negative. So 1 is the ceiling, and in practice the ratio stays well below it, because early coins that were tagged at cents still hold a small but non-zero share of the cost basis. Downwards there is no such limit. In late 2011 and early 2015 the ratio briefly went below −1.5, meaning the aggregate cost basis was more than two and a half times the market value.
NUPL and MVRV are the same information
If you have read the MVRV guide, you already know NUPL. MVRV is Market Cap divided by Realized Cap. A little algebra shows that NUPL = 1 − 1/MVRV. The two metrics are a single quantity, the gap between market value and cost basis, on two scales:
| MVRV | NUPL | Reading |
|---|---|---|
| 0.50 | −1.00 | Cost basis is twice the market value |
| 0.80 | −0.25 | Unrealised loss equal to 25% of market value |
| 1.00 | 0.00 | Market value equals cost basis |
| 1.61 | 0.38 | 38% of market value is paper gain (Sept 2026) |
| 2.00 | 0.50 | Half of market value is paper gain |
| 4.00 | 0.75 | Three quarters of market value is paper gain |
Why show both on the Bitcoin page? Because they read differently. MVRV is a multiple, natural for "the market prices the supply at 1.6 times its cost basis". NUPL is a share, natural for "38 percent of the value is gain on paper". Neither adds information the other lacks.
Where NUPL comes from
The metric was introduced in February 2019 by Tamas Blummer, Tuur Demeester and Michiel Lescrauwaet of Adamant Capital, in a paper on bitcoin investor sentiment. They called it Relative Unrealized Profit/Loss; NUPL is the name that stuck. The same paper attached descriptive labels to bands of the metric, and those labels are what most people now associate with it.
The phase labels, and why they are a convention
In on-chain commentary, NUPL charts are usually coloured into five bands with names such as "Capitulation" (below 0), "Hope/Fear" (0 to 0.25), "Optimism/Anxiety" (0.25 to 0.5), "Belief/Denial" (0.5 to 0.75) and "Euphoria/Greed" (above 0.75). Three things are worth knowing about them.
First, they are a community convention, not a property of the data. The 0.25 steps were chosen for readability; nothing in the ledger changes at 0.25 or 0.5.
Second, the labels describe an assumed emotional state of "the market". The ledger contains no emotions. It contains outputs, amounts and timestamps. A NUPL of 0.6 tells you 60 percent of market value is unrealised gain. Whether anyone feels "belief" about that is not in the data.
Third, the upper bands have become empty. NUPL has not been above 0.75 since December 2017. The peaks of the following cycles were 0.749 in February 2021, 0.642 in March 2024 and 0.603 in January 2025. Whatever the uppermost band was supposed to describe, the maturing cost basis means the ratio no longer reaches it. A label scheme that was calibrated on 2011 to 2017 data describes 2021 to 2026 poorly.
CoinVett shows the number and its 30-day range, without colours or labels. If you see a coloured NUPL chart elsewhere, read the number, not the colour.
NUPL since 2011: the record
From the Bitcoin Research Kit daily series, 1 January 2011 to 22 September 2026, purely as description.
- Negative readings (market value below cost basis) occurred on about 13 percent of days. Counted as unbroken runs of consecutive daily readings below 0, there were 31 of them; grouped by calendar stretch, four longer periods and a scattering of brief dips. The longer periods: late 2011 (September to December, low −1.52), January to October 2015 (a 191-day run to July and an 84-day run from 31 July, low −1.59), 21 November 2018 to 1 April 2019 (132 unbroken days, low −0.43) and June 2022 to January 2023 (180 negative days in five runs, low −0.33). The brief dips: 33 days between January and April 2012 (low −0.19), 18 days between October and December 2014 (low −0.07) and six daily readings in March 2020 (12 March and 14 to 18 March, low −0.11). The same pattern appears in the MVRV guide, necessarily: a negative NUPL and an MVRV below 1 are the same day.
- Readings above 0.5 (more than half of market value as paper gain) occurred on about 32 percent of days, concentrated in 2011, 2013, 2017, the first half of 2021, and parts of 2024 and 2025.
- Cycle highs have fallen from 0.86 (June 2011) and 0.83 (November 2013) to 0.79 (December 2017), 0.75 (February 2021), 0.64 (March 2024) and 0.60 (January 2025).
- 2026 so far: 0.37 on 1 January, 0.42 in mid-January, 0.09 at the end of June, 0.38 on 22 September.
These are facts about what the ledger showed on those dates. The periods of negative NUPL were followed by different things at different speeds; the one in 2015 lasted most of a year, the one in 2020 was over within a week. The record does not contain a rule.
One more thing the list shows, if you read it carefully: a period and a day count are not the same measurement. "June 2022 to January 2023" is a calendar span of about 210 days. Inside it, NUPL was negative on 180 days, in five runs of 36, 2, 22, 52 and 68 days, separated by short recoveries above zero in July, August, September and early November 2022. The lowest reading, −0.33 on 9 November 2022, sits inside the last and longest run. Someone who says "NUPL was negative for seven months" and someone who says "NUPL was negative 180 times" are both describing that stretch, and neither is wrong. What would be wrong is treating the seven months as one unbroken condition. On CoinVett you see the current daily value and its 30-day range; the history above is given so that you can place that value, not so that you can time anything by it.
What NUPL cannot do
- It cannot tell you whether the market is right. NUPL measures the gap between the supply's on-chain cost basis and what the market pays now. That cost basis is what the coins last changed hands for, not what any holder paid; it is a proxy, and lost coins and exchange wallets are baked into it. A large gap means large paper gains. It does not mean the price is too high, and a negative reading does not mean it is too low. Those are judgements the ledger does not make.
- It cannot predict. Every input is a past block and a past price. The number is a snapshot of the ledger as of the last computed day.
- Its bands are not thresholds. The phase labels are a convention from 2019. The cycle highs have fallen steadily since, so the same reading meant different things in different eras.
- It measures paper gain, not realised gain. Unrealised profit only becomes real when coins are sold. Most of the supply, about 63 percent, has not moved in over a year. NUPL says nothing about whether or when it will.
- It inherits every Realized Cap distortion. Lost coins, custodial reshuffles and change outputs all move the cost basis for reasons that have nothing to do with any holder's trading decision.
- It is not about your position. Your gain or loss is relative to your own purchase price. The aggregate figure has no bearing on it.
Hold it this way: on this date, this share of Bitcoin's market value was gain that holders had on paper. That sentence is complete.
Frequently asked questions
Should I look at NUPL or MVRV?
They carry the same information. Pick whichever reads more naturally to you. NUPL as a percentage of value is easier for most people to picture; MVRV as a multiple is easier to check against the price and Realized Price shown on the same page.
What does a negative NUPL mean, concretely?
That the Realized Cap is larger than the Market Cap: the supply, weighted by amount, last changed hands for more than it is worth today. The average holder is at an unrealised loss. Nothing more is implied.
Where does CoinVett's NUPL come from?
From the Bitcoin Research Kit running against a full node CoinVett operates. When that node is unavailable, the public instance of the same open-source software at bitview.space supplies the value, and the source label next to the figure says which one it was. The methodology page documents the sync and staleness rules.
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.