BlockShield/Metrics/Net Unrealized Profit/Loss (NUPL)

Net Unrealized Profit/Loss (NUPL)

NUPL is unrealized profit as a share of market cap. How BlockShield derives it from realized cap, its bands, and why it is withheld when the cross-check fails.

Drawn on the On-Chain tabAPI /api/v1/market/onchain/metricsCoin Metrics community dataan independent macro cross-check provider

What it measures

NUPL is the share of market capitalisation that is unrealized profit: market cap minus realized cap, divided by market cap. Negative means the network as a whole is holding at a loss.

It answers a market-wide question that the partial supply-in-profit figure cannot: it covers the whole supply, so it is the metric to read for network-wide profitability.

How it is built

NUPL and MVRV are two functions of the same input, realized capitalisation, and they are computed in the same place from the same series so the two can never disagree on screen.

The published bands — capitulation, hope and fear, optimism and anxiety, belief and denial, and above that euphoria — are threshold labels applied to the computed value, not a separate model.

The same two gates apply as to MVRV: an independent provider must agree within 5%, and the derivation must still be exact. Failing either withholds NUPL too, with the same named reason.

A percentile against the platform's own stored history ships with the value, so a reader can see where the current print sits in the record rather than only what band it lands in.

What to watch

NUPL and supply in profit answer different questions. The stored supply-in-profit figure covers recent coins only and understates the truth; NUPL covers everything.

Because NUPL is bounded by construction and MVRV is not, the two look very different at the extremes even though they carry the same information.

When the cross-check withholds the value, the tab shows the reason rather than the last good number. A stale number with no label is worse than an absence with one.

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Related metrics

MVRV Ratio
MVRV is market capitalisation divided by realized capitalisation: what the market says the coins are worth, over what the marke….
Realized Capitalisation & Realized Price
Realized capitalisation values every unspent output at the price it last moved at, rather than at spot.
Bitcoin Supply in Loss
A coin's cost basis is the market price on the day it last moved on-chain.
Spent Output Profit Ratio (SOPR)
SOPR is the ratio of the value of spent outputs at the moment they were spent to their value when they were created.
Every rule above is enforced in code and pinned by a test. The doctrine they all follow — NULL is not zero, partial cannot erase, an unfinished period is not evidence — is published on the methodology page.
Descriptive, not advice. Every score, band and verdict on this platform is an automated heuristic over public data and can be wrong in both directions. All metrics · Methodology · About · Dashboard