The Puell Multiple, explained

The sum

Day ÷ year

value mined today ÷ its 365-day average

Buy zone

≤ 0.43

our strong-buy line: miner revenue has collapsed

Sell zone

> 2.5

our strong-sell line: miners are flush

Published

2019

David Puell

A ratio built from one input, seen two ways. Take the USD value of the Bitcoin mined on any given day — coins issued that day multiplied by their price — and divide it by the 365-day moving average of that same figure. That's it. One number, updated daily, that tells you whether miners are earning more or less than their trailing yearly average.

It was published by on-chain analyst David Puell in 2019 — the same analyst who co-created MVRV, another foundational on-chain measure of whether Bitcoin looks cheap or expensive.

Bitcoin miners don't sell when they feel like it. They have real, recurring bills — electricity, hosting, the machines themselves — that come due regardless of what the market is doing. That makes them one of the few genuinely mechanical, non-emotional participants in the system: their income is set by price and by how many coins are being issued, and a share of it has to be sold to keep the lights on.

When that income spikes far above its own trend, miners are flush — under less pressure to sell, but also sitting on the kind of profit that historically gets taken. When it collapses, the least efficient miners are running at a loss, and forced capitulation — shutting down rigs, selling reserves — has repeatedly cleared the way for a bottom.

The top of the sum: newly issued coins that day, multiplied by that day's price — the daily issuance value.

The bottom of the sum: the 365-day average of that same daily issuance value — a rolling yearly baseline for what miners normally earn.

Divide one by the other and a reading of exactly 1.0 means miners are earning precisely their trailing yearly average. Above 1.0, they're earning more; below 1.0, less. Because it's a ratio, it doesn't care how large issuance is in absolute dollar terms — which matters, since the number of new coins paid out has been cut in half repeatedly and will keep shrinking on schedule.

Cold, sub-0.43 readings have historically lined up with the worst of Bitcoin's bear-market bottoms — periods when unprofitable miners were forced offline. Hot, above-2.5 readings lined up with the pre-2018 cycle tops, when miner revenue was running several multiples above trend — though the 2021 top never actually reached that threshold, peaking closer to 1.5–2.0. That's a genuinely useful track record, and it comes with real caveats.

The strong-buy-at-0.43-and-below, strong-sell-above-2.5 zones in the summary and diagram above are our own dividing lines, not values David Puell published — they are set against the cycles Bitcoin had lived through by 2019. The last two cycle tops have reached a lower peak Puell Multiple than the ones before them, as the flow of new coins has been cut further and mining has grown into a larger, better-funded industry. Judged only against those fixed lines, a top today could plausibly read as merely elevated rather than extreme — the 2021 peak, for instance, topped out well below the 2.5 strong-sell line.

Miners have to sell. That single fact turns their revenue into one of the more mechanical, least emotional signals in the entire market.

So alongside the raw multiple and its original buy/sell label, we also rank the current reading against its own full history and express that as a 0–100 score. That keeps the comparison honest as the market matures, instead of anchoring forever to what “extreme” meant back in 2019.

Watch the extremes, not the middle. Most of the time, the multiple sits close to 1.0 — miners earning near their trailing average, telling you nothing unusual. That's correctly boring, and it's when the ratio is quiet that it's doing its job.

A cold reading means pain, not opportunity in isolation. On the live chart, blue shading marks the bottom of the full-history risk score — not simply a raw reading below 0.43 — which has historically coincided with bottoms as unprofitable miners give up. But it's the market context around that pain, not the score alone, that turns it into a signal worth acting on.

The Puell Multiple is a supply-side indicator — it reads Bitcoin's cycle through the lens of the people who produce the coin, not the people who buy it. That's a genuinely different vantage point from valuation ratios like MVRV or sentiment measures like the Fear & Greed Index, and it's part of why it's stayed relevant since 2019.

It's also why we never read it alone. Miner economics are one input among many that move together — valuation, holder behaviour, momentum, macro. It feeds into our composite Bitcoin cycle score alongside indicators like AHR999, RHODL and NUPL, and it carries real weight there precisely because it measures something none of the others do.

Others in on-chain — What the blockchain itself says about holders, miners, and what people paid for their coins.

• Cost of ProductionA modelled miner cost floor from difficulty and issuance, and how far price trades above it.
• RHODL RatioThe balance between recently moved coins and long-dormant ones, which peaks near cycle tops.
• STH Realized PriceThe average price at which short-term holders bought — support in a bull market, resistance in a bear.
• Supply in Profit / Loss (NUPL)How much of all the Bitcoin out there is sitting on a paper profit, mapped to phases from panic to euphoria.
• Stock-to-FlowThe scarcity model that values Bitcoin from its issuance rate, shown with its deviation from actual price.

Every indicator we track — the full glossary.