Glossary / Markets & investing
MVRV ratio
Also known as Market value to realized value.
- Definition
- The MVRV ratio divides bitcoin's market capitalization by its realized capitalization, giving a single number for how far the price sits above what holders collectively paid.
Above 1 the average coin is in profit, below 1 it is under water. Murad Mahmudov and David Puell proposed it in October 2018, and readings under 1 have covered only a few multi-month windows since, one of them the 2022 bear market. Because the peak reading has fallen in every cycle, treat it as a thermometer with a shifting scale rather than a buy or sell trigger.
How it works
Two dollar totals over the same set of coins go into MVRV, so the units cancel and what comes out is a plain multiple.
Put 2 trillion dollars of market capitalization over 1 trillion of realized capitalization and MVRV is 2.0, meaning the average coin is being valued at twice the price it last changed hands for. Everything above 1.0 is paper profit spread across the network; everything below is paper loss.
Analysts usually plot the Z-score variant rather than the raw multiple. It subtracts realized capitalization from market capitalization and divides by the standard deviation of market capitalization, which converts a growing series into something comparable across cycles. Splitting the holder base helps too: the standard cut is 155 days, so coins moved more recently form the short-term holder cohort and everything older forms the long-term one, and their MVRV readings often point in opposite directions.
The calibration problem is real and worth stating plainly. Peaks came in close to 5 around the December 2017 top, nearer 4 in the April 2021 top, and lower again at the highs that followed the April 2024 halving. Each cycle draws in a larger, more expensive holder base, which drags realized capitalization up and compresses the ratio. A level that once meant euphoria now sits inside an ordinary rally, so any fixed threshold copied from an old chart is already wrong.
Where you see it
MVRV turns up on almost every on-chain dashboard and in the headlines that ask whether bitcoin is overvalued.
Glassnode, Coin Metrics and Woobull all publish a version, and the numbers differ slightly because each provider filters internal exchange movements differently. Cycle-top articles lean on the raw ratio; risk models prefer the Z-score.
What it cannot do is tell you when. MVRV has spent well over a year at elevated readings before, and it spent much of the second half of 2022 below 1 while the price kept grinding sideways. It is a statement about position, not about the next move, and it says nothing at all about the things that actually decide your outcome: your exchange's fees, whether your coins are in your own custody, and how much you can afford to have in a volatile asset.
If you buy on a schedule, MVRV changes nothing about what you should do this month. If you are deciding whether to add a lump sum, it is one useful piece of context alongside the honest observation that the metric's own thresholds keep moving.
MVRV ratio vs NVT ratio
MVRV compares price with what holders paid; NVT compares price with the value the network settles.
They answer different questions. MVRV asks whether the current price is stretched relative to the market's own cost base, so its denominator is a valuation. NVT asks whether the price is stretched relative to economic throughput, so its denominator is daily on-chain transaction value. That difference also gives them different failure modes: MVRV degrades as the holder base matures, while NVT degrades as settlement moves off the base chain.