NUPL — Bitcoin's Net Unrealized Profit/Loss
NUPL takes all the paper profit and paper loss sitting in every Bitcoin and nets it into one number — the unrealized profit of the whole network as a fraction of its market cap. Below 0, the market is collectively underwater; near 1, almost everyone is deep in the green. Glassnode mapped those levels onto named emotional zones — capitulation → hope → optimism → belief → euphoria — and the extremes have lined up with cycle tops and bottoms for a decade. It's the same cost-basis idea as MVRV, just dressed as crowd psychology: in fact NUPL = 1 − 1/MVRV.
What NUPL measures
Take Bitcoin's market cap (what the supply is worth today) and subtract its realized cap (what the market actually paid — see MVRV for how realized cap works). The difference is the total unrealized profit sitting in the network. Divide it by market cap and you get NUPL — that profit as a proportion of the whole:
equivalently: NUPL = 1 − (1 ÷ MVRV)
When NUPL is 0.6, roughly 60% of the current market value is unrealized profit — gains that exist on paper and could, in theory, be sold. When NUPL goes negative, the network paid more than it's worth today: the aggregate position is a loss. That single number turns out to be a remarkably good proxy for where the crowd sits between fear and greed.
The emotional zones
Glassnode's framing splits NUPL into five bands, each named for the dominant psychology — and, usefully, each band has a "fear" interpretation on the way down and a "greed" one on the way up:
| NUPL | Zone | Historically near |
|---|---|---|
| > 0.75 | Euphoria / Greed — almost all supply in deep profit | Cycle tops: 2017, 2021 |
| 0.5 – 0.75 | Belief / Denial — strong bull, profit-taking begins | Mid-to-late bull |
| 0.25 – 0.5 | Optimism / Anxiety — trend established, two-way risk | Markup and corrections |
| 0 – 0.25 | Hope / Fear — small net profit, fragile | Early recovery, late bear |
| < 0 | Capitulation — network underwater | Cycle bottoms: Dec 2018, Mar 2020, Nov 2022 |
The two zones that matter most are the ends. Above 0.75 — euphoria — has coincided with every major cycle top: when three-quarters of the market's value is unrealized profit, the supply overhang of potential sellers is enormous. Below 0 — capitulation — has coincided with every major bottom: when the network is underwater, the weak hands have largely already sold, and what's left is conviction.
The cohort versions
Splitting NUPL by holder age sharpens the read:
- LTH-NUPL (long-term holders, coins older than ~155 days) tracks the unrealized profit of the strongest hands. It reaching deep into euphoria is a late-cycle warning; it staying positive through a correction is a sign the bull is intact.
- STH-NUPL (short-term holders) tracks recent buyers. It diving below 0 means new money is underwater — a capitulation tell that's clustered near local and cycle bottoms.
The two halves that net into NUPL — Relative Unrealized Profit and Relative Unrealized Loss — can also be read separately to see whether a move is driven by profit building or loss unwinding.
Where it fits in btclyzer
btclyzer doesn't compute NUPL directly — its sentiment inputs are the Fear & Greed Index and the CBBI, and its on-chain inputs are mempool-based. NUPL is, in effect, the on-chain cousin of the Fear & Greed Index: where Fear & Greed reads social and market signals, NUPL reads the network's actual profit position. They tend to agree at extremes, and disagreement between them (e.g., social euphoria but NUPL not yet euphoric) can itself be informative. For the live NUPL value, on-chain platforms like Glassnode publish it directly.
Limitations
- Inherits realized-cap quirks. Lost and dormant coins distort the cost basis, slightly overstating unrealized profit (and NUPL).
- Drifting thresholds. The euphoria and capitulation bars were calibrated on early cycles; as the asset matured, the levels shifted. Read the shape and the visit-to-extreme, not a fixed number.
- Regime, not timing. NUPL can sit in euphoria for weeks. It tells you the conditions are stretched, not that the turn is today.
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