Bitcoin on-chain risk at 0.18: classic bear-market floor signal

Bitcoin's combined on-chain risk metric has fallen to 0.18, a level the network has historically spent little time below — a regime that, in every prior cycle, marked the late stages of a bear market and set the floor for the next leg higher.

The metric aggregates several on-chain signals into a single normalized score: percentage of supply in profit and loss, MVRV Z-Score, the Puell multiple, the MVRV score, miner-cap-to-thermocap ratio, transaction fees, market-cap-to-thermocap, terminal price, the RHODL ratio, and supply in profit. On its own, percentage of supply in profit/loss is the headline trigger — historically, when it crosses into deeply negative territory, Bitcoin finds a cycle low within one to four months. (In 2018/2022 the signal flickered mid-year before confirming later in the year, a precedent worth watching.)

Why it matters

Reading on-chain risk at 0.18 places Bitcoin in a window it has rarely occupied. Sub-0.2 readings cluster in midterm years, the same part of the cycle Bitcoin is in now. The current setup closely mirrors 2019: Bitcoin topped roughly two months before quantitative tightening ended in both 2019 and 2025, both saw three rate cuts in close succession, and neither produced a meaningful rotation into altcoins. That parallel argues the post-peak digestion phase of 2019-early 2020 is the cleanest analogue for the price action investors are seeing today.

The structural read is that supply-in-profit/loss bottoms precede the next bull market's starting line. Investors who treat 1-to-4-month windows after the cross as accumulation zones have historically caught the lows without needing to handicap the news flow — the metric, in other words, is the news.

Market impact

A confirmed low this year would set the cycle's reference point. The argument goes: if 2024-2025 played out as a 2019-style apathetic top rather than a euphoric one, then the bull market that follows could be the more euphoric of the two. The bear-market roadmap in that scenario is to watch on-chain risk carve out a multi-month trough through the rest of this year before turning higher into the post-halving window.

The watch items are timing and confirmation. October has been the most-cited window for the low, but the more important signal is a multi-month base in the composite on-chain risk — a single sharp spike back above 0.2 is not a confirmation; a flat, grinding low is. Investors who time off the news will likely get whipsawed; investors who time off this indicator's trough historically haven't.