Market sentiment · Price
The Fear & Greed Index, explained
The 0-100 sentiment gauge quoted everywhere in crypto — where the number comes from, how to read its five bands, and how a 30-day average of it feeds our cycle score.
- Scale
- 0–100
- Published by
- CoinGlass
- Also published by
- Alternative.me
- Heatmeter weight
- 5 / 7
extreme fear to extreme greed
one daily 0–100 reading
the same index, independently
of 100 — Bitcoin / Ethereum
What is the Fear & Greed Index?
A single number from 0 to 100 that tries to answer one question: is the crowd afraid right now, or greedy? It's become a fixture of crypto media precisely because it compresses a messy, emotional market into something you can glance at in a second.
Read low and it says panic — the kind of environment that has historically preceded bottoms. Read high and it says euphoria — the kind of environment that has historically preceded tops. It's a contrarian tool by design: the reading is most useful exactly when it's most extreme.
Where does the number actually come from?
We don't calculate this index ourselves. It is published by CoinGlass, and independently by Alternative.me, the site that popularised it in crypto media back in 2018. We take the number they publish.
The value on our chart is the value they publish. We don't reweight it, recompute it, or override it with a model of our own. All we do is sort it into a readable band and — for the heatmeters — smooth it.
How is the 0–100 scale read?
The value is split into five labelled bands, in this order from cold to hot:
- 0–20 · Extreme Fear — historically a contrarian buy zone
- 20–40 · Fear — below-average sentiment
- 40–60 · Neutral — no strong lean either way
- 60–80 · Greed — above-average sentiment
- 80–100 · Extreme Greed — historically a correction-risk zone
The same 20/40/60/80 boundaries mark the two extremes the contrarian read rests on, so the band named on a given day always matches the zone shaded under the line.
What goes into the index itself?
The method behind the published index — theirs, not ours — typically blends several inputs: price volatility, momentum and trading volume, social media activity, and how dominant Bitcoin is relative to the rest of the market. When those inputs skew toward panic, the number falls. When they skew toward euphoria, it rises.
That work happens at the publisher's end, so what you have above is their account of it. What we control is what happens to the number once it reaches the chart: the five bands, and the smoothing the Heat Meters use.
Has it ever been wrong?
Sentiment gauges don't break the way a formula does — they simply stay extreme for far longer than anyone expects. A market can sit in Extreme Greed for weeks during a strong trend, or in Extreme Fear through a slow grind lower, with no reversal arriving on any useful schedule.
The index itself isn't ours
The 0–100 value is published by CoinGlass, and independently by Alternative.me, and is shown exactly as published — the reading on our chart is their number, not a Blockchain Decoded calculation. What we add is the banding, and a smoothed version for the Heat Meters.
The middle three bands cover most readings
The scale splits at 20, 40, 60 and 80. Extreme Fear and Extreme Greed are the two ends worth acting on; between them, Fear, Neutral and Greed cover most days and mostly say the market has not made up its mind. Watch the number rather than the label.
The heatmeter sees a smoothed number, not the raw one
By default this chart shows the raw daily index (a 7-day and 30-day smoothing toggle is also available). What actually feeds the Bitcoin and Ethereum Heatmeters is a trailing 30-day average of that same index — deliberately slower, so one loud day of panic or euphoria doesn't swing a composite cycle score on its own.
Sentiment is a mood, not a level
Extreme readings can sit at the extreme for weeks during a strong trend before anything reverses. A single day at 85 tells you the crowd is euphoric right now — it does not tell you the top is today, this week, or this month.
How the heatmeters use it differently from the chart
The standalone Fear & Greed chart shows you the raw daily reading by default, exactly as published (it also offers a 7-day and 30-day smoothing toggle). That's the number in this article's bands above.
The Bitcoin and Ethereum Heatmeters see something else: the same underlying index, run through a rolling 30-day average before it's used as a risk input. The reasoning is straightforward — a composite cycle score is meant to describe where the market is, not what happened in the last 24 hours, and the raw daily index can swing an entire band on a single headline. Smoothing it turns a mood swing into a trend before it's allowed to move the composite.
The chart shows you the crowd's mood today. The heatmeter only listens once that mood has held for a month.
That smoothed reading carries a genuine but deliberately small weight in each composite: 5 out of 100 on the Bitcoin Heatmeter, 7 out of 100 on the Ethereum Heatmeter. The Ethereum weighting is a reasoned judgment rather than a split tested against Ethereum's own cycle history, and both figures are the current ones rather than fixed forever. Fourteen indicators feed each score in total — sentiment is one voice among them, not the loudest.
Where it fits
Fear & Greed is a mood indicator, not a valuation model or a timing tool. It doesn't know whether Bitcoin is cheap on-chain, whether the macro backdrop is supportive, or whether a rally has structural legs. It only knows how the crowd feels right now, and crowds are frequently wrong at exactly the moments that matter.
That's precisely why it's used the way it is here — as a small, smoothed contributor to a fourteen-indicator composite, sitting alongside valuation, miner-economics and holder-behaviour signals that have nothing to do with how anyone feels. A crowd at Extreme Greed means more when the on-chain and cycle-timing indicators agree with it than it does on its own.
Common questions
What is the Crypto Fear & Greed Index?
A widely-cited 0-100 gauge of crypto market sentiment. 0 means extreme fear, 100 means extreme greed. It is read as a contrarian signal — one you act against rather than with: extreme fear has historically coincided with market bottoms, the point where sellers finally give up, and extreme greed with euphoric tops. Neither is a guarantee.
Does Blockchain Decoded calculate its own Fear & Greed Index?
No. The index is published by CoinGlass and by Alternative.me, and we use the published value directly as our 0-100 risk reading. We add the classification bands and, for the Heat Meters, a 30-day average, but the sentiment number itself is theirs.
What do the Fear & Greed bands mean?
0-20 is Extreme Fear, 20-40 is Fear, 40-60 is Neutral, 60-80 is Greed, and 80-100 is Extreme Greed. These are the labels shown on this chart, and the same cut points mark the two extremes the contrarian read rests on. The sentiment widget on the dashboard uses a different set of labels, splitting at 25/45/55/75 instead.
Is Fear & Greed part of the Bitcoin or Ethereum Heatmeter?
Yes. A 30-day smoothed version of the index is one of the 14 inputs to both composite scores — weighted 5 out of 100 on the Bitcoin Heatmeter and 7 out of 100 on the Ethereum Heatmeter. It's a genuine but deliberately minor input; sentiment moves fast and the heatmeter is built to not overreact to it.
Why does the heatmeter use a 30-day average instead of the daily reading?
Because the raw daily index is noisy — it can swing from Fear to Greed inside a week on headline-driven moves. Smoothing it over 30 days turns a mood into a trend before it's allowed to move a composite cycle score, which is meant to reflect where the market is, not what happened yesterday.
Should I buy when the index shows Extreme Fear and sell at Extreme Greed?
That's the contrarian read the index is built for, and it has worked more often than not across past cycles — but 'more often than not' is not 'every time'. Extreme readings can persist for weeks in a strong trend, and the index carries a 5-7% weight in our composite scores precisely because we don't treat it as a signal on its own.
Related guides
Others in price & cycle models — What price is doing relative to its own history, trend and long-run models.
- Everything vs BTCAltcoin risk read from Bitcoin’s share of the market — when money moves out of Bitcoin and into everything else.
- Moving AveragesEighteen moving averages across Daily, Weekly and Monthly views, with the Bull Market Support Band and the Golden/Death Cross.
- Pi Cycle TopTwo moving averages — the 111-day and the doubled 350-day — whose crossing has landed within days of three Bitcoin cycle peaks.
- Pi Cycle BottomThe Pi Cycle Top upside down: two average-price lines used to spot the bottom of a cycle rather than the top.
- Log Regression BandPrice against a long-run trend line drawn through each coin’s whole history, split into six value zones.
Every indicator we track — the full glossary.
See it weighed alongside 13 other indicators
The raw index above is free to read anywhere. On the Bitcoin Heatmeter you get our layer on top: the smoothed sentiment reading, live, weighed at 5% alongside thirteen other cycle indicators into a single 0–100 score — updated daily.