Is the Bitcoin Bottom In? What 19 On-Chain Indicators Say About This Bear Market

The August 19 pump brought a lot of mixed sentiment. Bitcoin went from the low $60,000 range to above $80,000 in a matter of days, fueled by a massive Bitcoin short squeeze, renewed ETF inflows, and a U.S. Treasury decision to double long-end bond buybacks.  

Some are calling the end of the Bitcoin bear market. Others think this is a bull trap. 

At Bitcoin Suisse, we have been working on a bottom signal that aggregates  on-chain indicators and macro signals into a single framework. It has tracked every major Bitcoin bear market bottom since 2011 in backtesting. When we apply it to the current cycle, the picture is genuinely split, and it is worth walking through in detail before drawing any conclusions.

The indicator produces a monthly-averaged signal strength that measures what percentage of available signals are active at any given time. In previous crypto bear markets, this reading reliably hit what we define as the accumulation zone and went into the bottom zone. The 2015 cycle peaked at 0.73, 2018 at 0.66, and 2022 at 0.75. 

This cycle, we are at 0.49. That is the lowest peak of any bear market in our dataset. The bottom period has also been relatively short at approximately 200 days. So, on this measure, we are a bit far from previous bear markets.

On the other hand, if we look at how many of the indicators have flagged at least once over the whole bottom period, we are at 90%, similar to the previous three bottom periods. Using this measure alone, the cumulative coverage is consistent with prior confirmed bottoms.

But this is why the bottom is not yet confirmed. The composition of these bottom periods, if you look at the specific indicators, is not similar to previous ones. 

Bitcoin NUPL, or Net Unrealized Profit/Loss, measures whether the market as a whole is sitting on aggregate paper losses. It hits zero when the Bitcoin price equals the Bitcoin realized price, which is the sum of each coin's value when it was last moved on-chain, essentially the network-wide average cost basis. The current Bitcoin realized price is around $52,730.  

Bitcoin NUPL has been a very strong Bitcoin bottom indicator. It flagged at every single bottom in the previous cycles. Every time, BTC price went to or below the Bitcoin realized price, and that coincided with the absolute bottom. It has not happened this time. 

There is a nuance. If we use a four-year rolling 10th percentile as a dynamic threshold instead of the hard zero line, then NUPL has been hit. But if we take the zero horizontal line, which is what people usually do, it has not. So, it is definitely a strange situation.

Putting the numbers together across all five periods makes the ambiguity clear.

The current Bitcoin cycle has the lowest peak signal strength, the fewest maximum daily indicators, and at 3.80 years, the longest gap between bottoms. The cumulative coverage, however, is broadly in line with historical norms. For context on how Bitcoin cycle lengths have evolved alongside the halving schedule, see our analysis of the halving market cycle. 

There is no statistical significance with this data. We have four previous cycles to compare against, so it is very hard to assess what is going on with any certainty. We could say this bottom period has been short. But we could also say this might be the first time it looks like this across the past three bear markets. The 2018 cycle was similarly short at 213 days, so even the length is not definitive.

Reading the Split Signal

This Bitcoin bear market has behaved differently from its predecessors by these measures. The daily signals have been shallow. The bottom period has not produced the kind of concentrated distress days we saw in previous cycles. And the one indicator that flagged every prior bitcoin bottom has not triggered. 

At the same time, 90% of the indicators we track have fired at some point, and the macro catalysts behind the recent rally, Treasury liquidity support, institutional ETF flows, and improving regulatory clarity, suggest something more structural than a typical sentiment-driven bounce. 

Maybe this cycle has a different composition because the market itself has changed: a longer preceding bull run, stickier institutional capital, and macro policy doing more of the work than on-chain dynamics. Or maybe Bitcoin NUPL is telling us something the other indicators are not built to see. 

Article Image AI-generated.