The 10-Year Treasury Yield, explained

FRED series

DGS10

10-year constant maturity

Low zone

< 3%

shaded green, risk-on read

High zone

> 5%

shaded red, risk-off read

Frequency

Daily

every business day, unsmoothed

The annualized interest rate the US government pays to borrow money for ten years. Our chart tracks DGS10 — Market Yield on U.S. Treasury Securities at 10-Year Constant Maturity — published by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis (FRED) every business day, with no adjustment for the time of year.

It sits at the long end of the yield curve, in contrast to short-dated instruments and the Fed funds rate itself, which the Federal Reserve sets directly. The 10-year is different: it's set by the open market, by investors actually buying and selling long-dated bonds based on where they expect growth and inflation to land over the next decade.

Because a default on this debt is considered close to the least likely credit event in the dollar economy. That makes the 10-year yield the baseline return an investor can get with (in theory) no credit risk — the floor against which every other asset's expected return gets compared.

When the 10-year yield rises, the return demanded from riskier assets rises with it, because the safe alternative just got more attractive. When it falls, the opposite: bonds pay less, so capital is more willing to accept lower expected returns elsewhere in exchange for growth exposure.

Through the discount rate. Valuing any asset that pays out over time — a stock's future earnings, a bond's future coupons — means converting those future dollars into a present value, and the 10-year yield is a standard input to that discount rate. A higher 10-year yield makes a dollar promised five or ten years from now worth less today, which compresses the multiple investors are willing to pay for the same earnings stream. A lower yield does the reverse.

That mechanism is direct and mechanical for equities and bonds. It is not direct for Bitcoin and crypto — they generate no cash flows to discount in the first place. The effect on crypto runs one step removed: a higher risk-free rate raises the bar for every risky bet in the portfolio, crypto included, and tends to pull capital toward the now more competitive safe alternative. Overlap between yield spikes and crypto drawdowns is common, but it's an indirect, sentiment-and-liquidity channel, not the same valuation arithmetic that applies to a discounted cash flow.

They are a reading aid, not a score. The line itself is the yield exactly as the Federal Reserve publishes it — nothing is ranked, weighted or averaged on the way to your screen, the way it is behind MVRV or a Heatmeter reading.

The green / yellow / red shading is drawn on top at two fixed levels, 3% and 5%: below 3% shades green, 3%–5% shades yellow, and above 5% shades red. Those two numbers stay where they are — they don't re-rank themselves against a growing history the way, for example, MVRV does.

The 10-year yield doesn't predict Bitcoin. It sets the price of the alternative Bitcoin is competing against.

Direction and speed, more than the raw level. A slow drift from 3% to 4% over a year reads very differently from the same move happening in six weeks. A rapid yield spike forces the market to reprice discount rates quickly, which is the same mechanical pressure that can weigh on share and crypto valuations in that window; a rapid drop eases that same pressure. This is the mechanism behind the move, not a signal that times it.

Watch it alongside the Fed funds rate, not instead of it. The two usually move together but can diverge — the 10-year reflects the market's own forward expectations, while the Fed funds rate is a direct policy lever. A widening gap between them is itself information the short rate alone doesn't give you.

The Bitcoin overlay puts both lines on one timeline. It is on by default, so you can see at a glance how Bitcoin behaved during past yield spikes and past falls without flipping between two charts.

This chart tracks the 10-year in isolation. It doesn't plot the shorter-dated 2-year yield or compute the 10-year-minus-2-year spread that market commentary refers to when a yield curve "inverts" — a widely watched recession signal. That spread is a separate calculation this page and this chart do not make; treat the 10-year level here as one half of that picture, not the whole thing.

The 10-year Treasury yield is a macro backdrop indicator — a discount-rate input that moves stocks and bonds directly and crypto indirectly through risk appetite. It says nothing about on-chain activity, holder behaviour, or crypto-specific valuation on its own.

It is a free chart on Blockchain Decoded, alongside the rest of our economic and traditional-market series — the Fed funds rate, CPI, unemployment, real GDP, US M2 and the major stock indices. None of that group, including this one, feeds into the Bitcoin or Ethereum Heatmeter score; they're context you read alongside that score, not an extra vote inside it.

Others in macro — Interest rates and the supply of money — the backdrop crypto ultimately trades against.

• Treasury General AccountThe US Treasury’s cash balance, which drains or adds liquidity as it fills and empties.
• Treasury Debt RolloverHow much government debt matures each year and has to be refinanced.
• Consumer Price IndexHeadline inflation, year over year.
• Core PCEThe inflation measure the Federal Reserve actually targets.
• Unemployment RateLabour-market slack — half of the Fed’s dual mandate.

Every indicator we track — the full glossary.