NUPL (Net Unrealized Profit/Loss)

NUPL takes the same two building blocks as MVRV — market cap and realized cap — but expresses the gap between them as a fraction of market cap rather than a standard-deviation score:

The result is a single number, typically between −0.5 and 1, that summarizes whether the network as a whole is holding coins at a profit or a loss.

Because it's a ratio rather than a Z-score, NUPL is easier to read at a glance and is commonly divided into named bands — capitulation, hope/fear, optimism/anxiety, belief/denial, and euphoria/greed — that map to the psychological stage of the cycle.

Say market cap is $1.4 trillion and realized cap is $0.8 trillion. The unrealized profit across the network is $0.6 trillion. Divide that by market cap:

A reading of 0.43 lands in the "optimism/anxiety" band — the network holds meaningful unrealized profit, but is well short of the ~0.75 euphoria zone that has marked past tops. If price fell until market cap dropped to $0.78T against the $0.8T realized cap, NUPL would print slightly negative — the capitulation band, where the average coin is underwater.

Readings above roughly 0.75 ("euphoria") have historically clustered right around major cycle tops — the point where nearly the entire supply is sitting on a large unrealized gain and the incentive to take profit is highest.

Readings near or below zero mean the average holder is underwater. That "capitulation" zone has shown up at the deepest points of prior bear markets (late 2018, March 2020, late 2022), after which NUPL has historically turned back up well before price fully recovered.

NUPL's strength is that its bands translate a valuation extreme into the market's likely emotional state, which makes it useful as a context gauge rather than a trigger: it tells you which stage of the cycle the average holder is psychologically in. Because it shares inputs with MVRV Z-Score, running both doesn't double your information — pair NUPL instead with a realized-behavior signal like SOPR (are holders actually selling that profit?) for a more independent read.

NUPL sits in the on-chain & valuation family — the most heavily weighted of the four families blended into the Risk Model's 0–10 score. Because NUPL and MVRV overlap, the model treats the valuation family as a group rather than stacking near-identical metrics, and balances it against cycle, momentum, and sentiment signals. See the published category weights on the Methodology page.

NUPL inherits every limitation of realized cap — it's a network-wide average, not a distribution, so it can't tell you whether profit is concentrated in a few large holders or spread broadly. It also moves closely with MVRV (they share the same inputs), so using both together adds less independent information than it might appear to. And like every band threshold here, the "euphoria" line has drifted lower each cycle, so past cutoffs are a guide, not a guarantee.