The 200-Week MA Heatmap, explained

Moving average

200w

roughly a 1,400-day average

Dot color basis

28-day change

how fast the average is rising

Color bands

13

indigo (coldest) to crimson (hottest)

History from

2011

a dot for every day since

A Bitcoin price chart built around one line: the 200-week (~1,400-day) moving average. That line has acted as a long-run support level for Bitcoin through most of its history — but not an unbroken one: price closed below it for roughly 16 months starting June 2022.

The "heatmap" part comes from how the price dots are colored. Instead of a flat line, price is drawn as a series of dots, each shaded on a spectrum from cool (indigo, blue, cyan) to hot (yellow, orange, crimson) to make cycle phases easier to spot at a glance than a plain price line would.

Most descriptions of this style of chart say the colors track how far price sits above the 200-week average. This one works differently.

Each dot takes its color from how much the 200-week average itself has moved over the past 28 days — how fast that average is currently rising — placed on a 13-band spectrum. A slowly climbing average produces cool colors (indigo through cyan); a rapidly climbing average produces warm colors (yellow through crimson), whatever price happens to be doing above or below the line at that moment.

The two ideas overlap — the average tends to speed up when price is running well above it, and to flatten out when price is depressed near or below it — but they answer different questions. These colors tell you how quickly the long-run trend is climbing, not how expensive Bitcoin is today.

Thirteen of them, running from the slowest readings up past 16%. At the cold end, an average that has grown less than 0.5% over 28 days is labeled Extreme Bear and shown in deep indigo — the line is barely moving, flat, or even turning down. Up through the purple, blue and cyan bands (Strong Bear, Bear Market, Early Recovery, Building Momentum), the average is picking up pace. Teal and green (Healthy Bull, Strong Bull, Accelerating) mark steady, faster growth. Past 10%, the bands turn warm — gold, orange, then red — through Hot Market, Very Hot, Overheating and Extreme Heat, up to 16% and above, labeled Peak Euphoria and shown in crimson.

The same thirteen bands do both jobs: they color the dots, and they supply the phase name you see when you hover a point on the live chart.

No — it gives you a picture instead. Hover any point on the live chart and you get Bitcoin's price that day, the 200-week average, how fast that average was rising as a percentage, and the phase label for that band. Where MVRV or NUPL boil the market down to one number between 0 and 100, this chart shows you the shape of the whole cycle at once.

The line has held most cycles, not all of them. The color on top of it is measuring how fast that line itself is climbing — not how far price has run away from it.

Watch the line, not just the dots. The 200-week average itself is the historically meaningful support level — the closer price sits to it, the more significant that zone has been in past cycles, regardless of what color the dots currently show.

Cold colors mean a slow-moving average, not necessarily a low price. A long stretch of cool colors means the 200-week average is barely speeding up — typically a bear-market or early-recovery condition — while warm colors flag periods when the average itself is climbing fast, which has tended to happen well into bull runs.

A ~1,400-day average is slow by design — it smooths out entire bull-and-bear cycles into a single, gently rising line. Across most of Bitcoin's completed cycles, price has found support at or near that line during bear-market bottoms, then spent extended periods well above it during bull runs. That track record, not the color scheme layered on top, is the core reason this chart exists.

"Has usually held" is a description of the past, not a guarantee — and it has already been tested. Bitcoin closed below its 200-week average for roughly 16 months starting in June 2022. The line is a strong historical pattern, not a floor, and it can be broken.

The 200-Week MA Heatmap is a long-term trend indicator — it says something about the pace of a very slow-moving average and, indirectly, about how far into a broader bull or bear phase Bitcoin currently sits. It doesn't reduce to a single score, and it isn't one of the weighted inputs behind either the Bitcoin or Ethereum Heatmeter.

It also covers Bitcoin only. CoinGlass doesn't publish this measure for other assets, so there is no Ethereum equivalent of this chart.

Others in price & cycle models — What price is doing relative to its own history, trend and long-run models.

• MVRVWhat every Bitcoin is worth today against what it last changed hands for — a read on collective paper profit.
• Reserve RiskHow patient long-term holders are against the price they could sell at — cheap when they hold through a rally.
• Risk WaveHow far price has stretched from its long-run average, adjusted so Bitcoin’s wild early years don’t dwarf recent moves.
• Oscillator RiskHow today’s market conditions rank against every reading on record — 0 is the calmest, 100 the most stretched.
• BDZOur own measure of how far Bitcoin’s price has stretched from its recent average, in either direction.

Every indicator we track — the full glossary.