2026-09-25 · Market cycles & signals

Bitcoin — do MVRV and funding signal a cycle top?

Data as of 24–25 Sep 2026.

Bottom line: there is no strong top signal for BTC. Every candidate either misses the recent peaks or fires hundreds of percent early. MVRV peaks fall from one cycle to the next, so no fixed threshold that "worked" in 2013–2017 would have triggered in 2021–2025. The 6 Oct 2025 price top ($124.8K) printed at an MVRV of 2.29 — below every classic threshold (3.0, 3.5, 3.7).

Peak BTC MVRV in each cycle. CoinMetrics (CapMVRVCur, daily); 2024–2026 cross-checked against bitcoin-data.com: Mar 2024 — 2.75 vs 2.68–2.78, Jan 2025 — 2.52 vs 2.46–2.52, Oct 2025 — 2.29 vs 2.29; gaps up to 0.07.

Candidate A — BTC perp funding: confirmation, not a signal

7-day funding on Deribit's BTC-PERPETUAL ahead of price tops (annualised):

• The popular "> 30% annualised" threshold would have fired 2 times out of 5. Controls: quiet Jun 2021 — −15.9%, Jun 2023 — 7.6%, 17–24 Sep 2026 — 9.3%.
• False positives outside tops weren't counted — there's no weekly series back to 2019 here.
• 🔴 Venues disagree: ahead of 6 Oct 2025, FTI Consulting and CoinDesk Research report funding going "~10% → ~30% annualised" across several venues, while Deribit shows 17.5%. Same top: the threshold fires on one venue and not on another.
• Funding tells you how large the loss will be if a shock comes — not the probability of the shock. Thresholds like "> 25% for three days running" were calibrated on a single episode.

Candidate B — MVRV as a phase marker, not a trigger

• A post-2024 "hot" level for BTC: MVRV ≥ 2.5 — the 2025 high (2.52, 21 Jan 2025) and the 95th percentile since 2024 (2.54).
• Reached: Mar 2024 (2.78, local top), Nov–Dec 2024 (2.74), Jan 2025 (2.52). Missed the Oct 2025 top (2.29). That's 3 of 4 local tops since 2024 — but each trigger was followed by another +20…+70% in price.
• A rolling 2-year 95th percentile (the usual substitute for a fixed threshold) fires far too early: the first trigger in each bull cycle came +136…+773% before the top (2016, 2020, Dec 2023). Useless as an exit signal.
• The only peer-reviewed paper on MVRV-Z (Grobys, Näsman & Sandretto, 2026, RIBF 89:103486) finds its exit rule failed in the 2022–2025 cycle. The general read: cycle indicators are a soft tilt at best, never a binary trigger — at least until several post-ETF cycles have played out.

What round price levels mean in MVRV terms

BTC's realised price is now ≈ $53.5K (price $84.4K ÷ MVRV 1.577, 24 Sep 2026). If it stayed put, $150K would mean MVRV ≈ 2.8 and $200K ≈ 3.7. BTC's MVRV hasn't exceeded 2.93 since November 2021. Realised price rises over time, so this mapping is a bound, not a prediction.

How this can be used

• Funding > 30% annualised — as confirmation of froth alongside other signs, not a standalone signal: 2 of 5 tops, and venue-dependent.
• MVRV ≥ 2.5 — as a "hot phase" marker, historically followed by another +20…+70%.
• Neither — also an honest option: both candidates are weak, and a rule built on them would be overfitted to a single cycle.

What would kill this, and by when

Forecast (a bet that BTC's MVRV peaks keep falling cycle over cycle): the highest daily BTC MVRV (CoinMetrics CapMVRVCur) over 26 Sep–24 Dec 2026 will be below 2.5. It fails if any day prints ≥ 2.5 — then the "hot" level isn't a ceiling for the new regime.

What we don't know

• No instrument yet: a weekly BTC funding series since 2019 across venues — without it, the false-positive rate of the 30% threshold is unknown. Obtainable from the Deribit and Hyperliquid public APIs.
• No instrument yet: a second MVRV source before Sep 2022 (bitcoin-data.com starts 25 Sep 2022); 2013–2021 values come from a single source.
• Nobody knows: whether falling MVRV peaks will stop now that ETFs and corporate treasuries are in — there's only one cycle since 2024.

Data: CoinMetrics community API (CapMVRVCur, PriceUSD, CapMrktCurUSD; 2011-01-01…2026-09-24), bitcoin-data.com /v1/mvrv and /v1/mvrv-zscore (2022-09-25…2026-09-18), Deribit public get_funding_rate_value BTC-PERPETUAL (7-day sum, annualised ×365/7). The 2.5 "hot" level rests on a single cycle; the funding window is the 7 days before the price top.

Research for information only. Not investment advice.