The Pi Cycle Top, explained

Fast line

111d

average price of the last 111 days

Slow line

350d

average price of the last 350 days, doubled

Ratio

3.153

π is 3.14159

Signals ever

3

2013 · 2017 · 2021

Two moving averages — running averages of Bitcoin's price over a set number of days — that spend most of the cycle far apart. When the fast one catches the slow one, Bitcoin has historically been at or near its peak.

That's the whole indicator. No on-chain data, nothing proprietary, no machine learning. Two lines on a price chart.

The Pi Cycle Top was published by Philip Swift in 2019, and the numbers are less arbitrary than they look. It compares Bitcoin's 111-day simple moving average against its 350-day simple moving average, doubled. Divide 350 by 111 and you get 3.153. Pi is 3.14159. Of all the whole numbers you could divide 350 by, 111 lands closest to pi — which is where the name comes from.

The pi relationship is a coincidence, not a mechanism. Nothing about how Bitcoin's market works is driven by a circle constant. The numbers were found by looking backwards at what fit, and the name stuck because it's memorable.

That doesn't make the indicator useless. It just means it earns its keep through what it measures, not through what it's called.

The 350-day average is roughly a year of price history — the cycle's centre of gravity. Doubling it gives you a line that sits far above trend. The 111-day average is about a quarter, responsive enough to track a real move but slow enough to ignore noise.

For the 111-day line to climb all the way up to twice the yearly average, price has to have risen far, fast, and without meaningful pause. That combination — steep, sustained, unbroken — is what the final, near-vertical stretch of a bull market looks like from the inside.

So the crossover isn't predicting anything. It's measuring how stretched the market has become relative to its own recent history, and telling you when that stretch reaches a level it has only reached at cycle peaks.

Three signals in Bitcoin's entire history: 2013, 2017 and 2021. Each landed within a few days of a major cycle peak. That's a remarkable hit rate, and it deserves an equally clear set of caveats.

Most versions of the Pi Cycle Top treat it as a single event — the lines cross, an alarm goes off, done. That is not how selling works in practice. Very few people act on one day's closing price.

So we treat the crossover as the opening of a range rather than a moment, and we call that window the Pi Cycle Top Range. When the 111-day average crosses above the doubled 350-day average, the range opens. When they cross back, it closes. The span between those two events is the window in which the market has historically been at its most stretched — and it's the window in which selling into strength has made sense.

The question stops being “is today the top?” — which nobody can answer — and becomes “are we inside the zone where tops happen?”

Alongside the range, we score how close the two averages are to each other on a 0–100 scale, so you can see the squeeze building before it completes rather than only after. A reading in the low range means the averages are far apart and the market is early in its cycle. A high reading means they're converging and the range is close to opening.

The gap is the message. Watch the distance between the two lines, not their absolute levels. Wide means early cycle, plenty of room. Narrowing means the market is heating up faster than its own trend. Touching means historically dangerous.

Silence is the normal state. For most of any given cycle this indicator says nothing, and that silence is what makes the signal worth something when it finally arrives. An indicator that always has an opinion is an indicator that isn't measuring anything.

The Pi Cycle Top is a timing indicator for one specific event: the top of a Bitcoin bull cycle. It says nothing about whether Bitcoin is cheap, whether the macro backdrop supports a rally, or what altcoins will do. That narrowness is a feature. It does one thing, it does it with two lines you can verify yourself, and when it has spoken it has been worth listening to.

It's also why we never read it alone. A single indicator with three historical signals is a data point, not a strategy. It carries real weight in our composite Bitcoin cycle score precisely because it's combined with a dozen others measuring completely different things — valuation, miner economics, holder behaviour, sentiment. When several of them agree, that agreement means considerably more than any one line crossing another.

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

• 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.
• Rainbow ChartThe same long-run trend line drawn as nine coloured bands, from deep value to bubble territory.
• Golden Ratio MultiplierPrice against multiples of the 350-day moving average, a ladder that has caught intermediate cycle highs.
• 200-Week MA HeatmapHow far price sits above its 200-week average — a floor Bitcoin has only briefly traded under, at the deepest lows.

Every indicator we track — the full glossary.