Valuation · Bitcoin
The Bitcoin Rainbow Chart, explained
A best-fit line drawn through Bitcoin’s whole price history, framed by nine coloured valuation bands from Fire Sale to Maximum Bubble Territory. How the bands are built, what colour Bitcoin is trading in right now, and how to read that colour.
- Bands
- 9
- Asset
- BTC
- Source
- CoinGlass
- Position
- 0–100
valuation layers around a best-fit line
Bitcoin only, no other coins
their published band values
where price sits between the bands
What is the Rainbow Chart?
A single curve fitted through Bitcoin's entire price history, drawn on a scale where each step up the axis multiplies the price rather than adding to it — the only way one picture can hold both Bitcoin's earliest prices and today's. Nine parallel bands are set above and below that curve. The result looks like a rainbow laid over the price chart, and each stripe carries a name that describes how expensive Bitcoin looks relative to its own long-run trend.
Read it by asking one question: which colour is the price inside right now? That's the entire indicator. There's no separate signal to interpret — the chart is the reading.
Where does the curve come from?
Blockchain Decoded doesn't fit the curve itself for this chart. The nine band values, already positioned against Bitcoin's price for every date, come from CoinGlass. For each date they publish the price, a floor value below the lowest band, and the nine layers above it. We turn that into a chart and a 0–100 position score, but the curve itself is theirs.
A curve fitted to past data will always look clean in hindsight — it was chosen because it explained the past. Whether the same curve keeps describing the future is a separate question, and one the chart itself cannot answer.
The nine bands, coolest to warmest
From the bottom of the chart to the top, the nine layers are named: Fire Sale - Basically a Gift, BUY! Accumulate, Still Cheap - Keep Stacking, Accumulation Zone, HODL! - Hold Strong, Is This a Bubble?, FOMO Intensifies, Sell. Seriously, SELL!, and Maximum Bubble Territory. Blue and green sit low, yellow sits in the middle as the fair-value band, and orange through deep red mark progressively more stretched territory.
How is a 0–100 position calculated?
Take the nine band lines plus the floor value below them, put them in order, and find where the current price falls. Price at or below the lowest scores 0. Price at or above the highest scores 100. Anywhere in between, the score is how far through the current band the price sits, added to how many full bands it has already cleared, divided by the nine gaps between the ten lines.
That number is a position, and only a position. It is not a ranking against history, and not a probability of anything. It measures one thing: how far price sits between two specific curves on a specific day.
Has the Rainbow Chart ever been wrong?
The chart always looks right about the past for a simple reason: the curve was drawn using that past, every peak and crash included, so of course the bands sit neatly around them. What matters is what that implies going forward — a curve tuned to the past promises nothing about the next cycle.
The colours come from a fitted curve, not a law
The curve is fitted to Bitcoin’s own price history. It describes where price has travelled before, not a rule about where it must go. A decade that behaved differently would bend every band with it.
The bands themselves have shifted over time
Rainbow charts published years apart don’t agree with each other, because redrawing the curve with more data quietly moves the bands underneath prices that already happened. What looked like "Sell" in one version can look like "Hold" in a later one.
It reads best zoomed all the way out
This is a years-wide picture. Read it week to week and the bands barely move while price swings around inside one of them, which makes the chart feel wrong for anything shorter than a multi-month view.
It stands alone here — no composite weight
Unlike Pi Cycle Top or MVRV (a Bitcoin valuation measure) on Blockchain Decoded, the Rainbow Chart does not feed either Heat Meter score — it stands on its own. The live page names the colour band price is sitting in and shows a rounded 0–100 position alongside it, so the reading you see moves in steps rather than by the decimal.
A curve fitted to the past will always look clean in hindsight. The question the chart can't answer is whether tomorrow keeps agreeing with it.
How do you read the Rainbow Chart in practice?
Zoom out, not in. The bands move on a multi-year scale. Watching it day to day just shows you normal price noise inside one stripe — the chart earns its keep over months and cycles, not days.
Colour, not price, is the unit. $60,000 could sit in the cool bands early in a cycle and in the warm bands late in one, because the bands themselves rise over time. There is no fixed price that always means the same thing on this chart.
The name is a description, not a command. "Sell. Seriously, Sell!" is a memorable label, not financial advice tuned to your position, your timeline, or your tax situation.
Where it fits
The Rainbow Chart is a valuation tool for one specific question: relative to Bitcoin's own long-run trend, is the current price cheap, fair, or stretched? It says nothing about timing a top or bottom to the week, nothing about on-chain holder behaviour, and nothing about macro conditions.
Unlike Pi Cycle Top or MVRV on Blockchain Decoded, it isn't currently one of the weighted inputs feeding either Heat Meter's composite score — it stands on its own, as one long-term valuation picture among several the platform tracks. That makes it a chart worth checking on its own terms, and worth pairing with other measures before treating a colour as a decision.
Common questions
What is the Bitcoin Rainbow Chart?
A long-term valuation chart that draws a best-fit line through Bitcoin’s price history, then frames it with nine parallel bands set above and below it. Each band carries a name — from Fire Sale at the bottom to Maximum Bubble Territory at the top — and price is read by which coloured band it currently sits inside.
Where does the data come from?
The band values come ready-made from CoinGlass, who publish Bitcoin’s price alongside the nine layer values for every date. We don’t fit the curve ourselves for this chart — CoinGlass supplies both the curve and the price already positioned against it.
How is the colour band chosen?
Bitcoin’s current price is compared against the ten lines for that date — the floor value plus the nine band lines above it. Below the lowest scores 0 on a 0–100 scale; above the highest scores 100; anywhere between two lines, the score is simply how far through that gap the price sits. The live chart names the zone that position falls into, and shows a rounded reading in steps — 10, 20, and so on up to 90 and 95 — rather than the exact number.
What are the nine Rainbow Chart bands, in order?
From coolest to warmest: Fire Sale - Basically a Gift, BUY! Accumulate, Still Cheap - Keep Stacking, Accumulation Zone, HODL! - Hold Strong, Is This a Bubble?, FOMO Intensifies, Sell. Seriously, SELL!, and Maximum Bubble Territory. Blue and green sit at the bottom, yellow in the middle, orange and red at the top.
Is the Rainbow Chart part of the Bitcoin Heat Meter?
No. As of this writing it isn’t one of the weighted inputs in either the Bitcoin or Ethereum Heat Meter composite score — it runs as its own standalone chart with its own 0–100 position value, separate from the composite.
Does the Rainbow Chart work for other assets?
On Blockchain Decoded, no — the live chart is fixed to Bitcoin, with no way to switch coins and no way to switch the price scale. The curve is fitted to Bitcoin’s own multi-year price path and nothing else.
Related guides
Others in price & cycle models — What price is doing relative to its own history, trend and long-run models.
- 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.
- 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.
Every indicator we track — the full glossary.
See which band Bitcoin is in right now
Everything above is how the Rainbow Chart works. On the live chart you get the current price plotted against all nine bands in real time, with the current zone named for you — no squinting at a static image to work out where today falls.