Bitcoin

Today's state: Bitcoin is trading at $59,922.41 with a $1,200.6 billion market capitalization (rank #1). The price moved +2.56% over the past 24 hours and is -4.60% over 7 days; the 30-day move stands at -3.74% and the 90-day at -10.43%.

Position vs cycle: Trading more than 50% below the all-time high places the asset in correction-territory deep enough that statistical mean-reversion historically gives way to narrative- and liquidity-driven moves.

Volatility and structure: 30-day realized volatility of 43.7% annualized is moderate for an asset this size. Our composite multi-horizon Price Strength reads Bearish (32/100), against a weakening multi-horizon backdrop with cumulative pressure across 30/90-day windows.

Bitcoin's four-year cycle is anchored to the halving: every 210,000 blocks (roughly four years), the block reward — and therefore the rate at which new BTC enters circulation — is cut in half. The schedule is hard-coded into the protocol and cannot be changed without overwhelming social consensus, making the halving the only credibly predictable supply-side event in any major asset class.

The latest halving was on April 19, 2024, at block 840,000, dropping the reward from 6.25 BTC to 3.125 BTC. The next is projected for around April 2028 at block 1,050,000, dropping the reward to 1.5625 BTC. Each halving cuts the daily issuance roughly in half while structural demand (ETF flows, treasury allocations, retail purchases) stays steady or grows — producing the supply-demand asymmetry that has historically marked the start of each multi-quarter bull cycle.

Historical post-halving returns: the 2012 cycle delivered approximately 96× from halving day to cycle peak (peak ~$1,150 in November 2013); the 2016 cycle delivered approximately 30× (peak ~$19,800 in December 2017); the 2020 cycle delivered approximately 7.9× (peak ~$69,000 in November 2021). The trend has been clear: diminishing returns as the market matures, but consistent directional pattern of multi-quarter expansion lasting roughly 12–18 months from each halving.

The current cycle — 2024 halving — has the additional structural change that spot Bitcoin ETFs were approved in January 2024, three months before the halving. ETFs absorb approximately 2,000–4,000 BTC per day in net buying during accumulation phases, comparable in magnitude to daily new issuance at the current 3.125-BTC reward. This is a permanent demand sink that did not exist in any prior cycle and is the primary structural reason this cycle's base case looks different from prior cycles.

Beyond Bitcoin, BTC's 90-day return correlations to the other two largest layer-1 references help characterize whether the asset moves as part of a crypto-market beta complex or as something more idiosyncratic. The Pearson correlations across daily log returns:

• Ethereum reference: +0.90 — a very strong positive relationship.
• Solana reference: +0.82 — a very strong positive relationship.

High correlation across several references usually means the asset is mostly crypto-market beta: when BTC, ETH and SOL move, it moves too, and independent alpha is hard to find. Low or negative readings point to its own drivers — project-specific news, intra-crypto sector rotation or narrative shifts — that can decouple it from the broad market.

Bitcoin (BTC) is a Layer-1 cryptocurrency, running on its own independent blockchain network. It trades at $59,922.41 as of the latest update, with a 24-hour move up 2.57%, placing it at rank #1 by market capitalisation among all listed digital assets. Bitcoin's current market cap stands at $1.20T, a figure used by traders, analysts and institutional desks to gauge relative liquidity and risk exposure across the crypto market.

On this page you'll find a live, daily-refreshed dashboard tracking Bitcoin across multiple data sources — price history going back several years, on-chain activity where available, fundamentals like circulating supply and dilution, top exchanges by volume, technical analysis using moving averages and RSI, and an algorithmic short, mid and long-term forecast. All figures are pulled from public APIs and cached locally; nothing here is investment advice.

Bitcoin (BTC) is the original cryptocurrency: a decentralized, peer-to-peer digital monetary network proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in October 2008 and launched in January 2009. With a hard-capped supply of 21 million coins and a predictable issuance schedule that halves every four years, it was designed as digital sound money — credibly scarce, censorship-resistant, and verifiable without trusting any third party.

Bitcoin's value proposition is deliberately narrow. It does not aim to be programmable money, the substrate for an application platform, or a high-throughput payments rail. It aims to be the most resilient, most credibly neutral, and most predictably scarce monetary asset in human history — and the metric that matters most is its survival and security over decades, not its block time or transaction throughput in a given quarter.

At the time of writing, Bitcoin trades at $59,922 with a market capitalization of $1,201 billion, representing roughly 50% of all cryptocurrency value. It is widely accepted as a store-of-value reserve asset by individuals, corporate treasuries, sovereign entities, and — since the January 2024 spot-ETF approvals — large-scale institutional allocators.

Bitcoin is secured by proof-of-work mining: miners compete to solve a cryptographic puzzle, and whoever solves it first publishes the next block of transactions and earns the block reward. The network adjusts the puzzle difficulty every 2,016 blocks (roughly two weeks) so that a new block is produced about every 10 minutes regardless of how much computing power is online. Bitcoin has no smart contracts, no staking, no validator set, and no on-chain governance — it is intentionally a single-purpose monetary network.

The supply is capped at 21 million BTC, and the block reward halves every 210,000 blocks (roughly four years). The latest halving cut the reward to 3.125 BTC in April 2024; the next is projected for around April 2028 at 1.5625 BTC. Each halving compresses the new-supply schedule and historically marks the structural inflection point of a four-year cycle.

Throughput on the base layer is intentionally constrained — about 7 transactions per second on average. Higher-volume use cases run on second layers, most notably the Lightning Network, which uses payment channels secured by Bitcoin to settle high-frequency, low-fee transactions.

Bitcoin's primary use cases reflect its monetary-network design:

• Store of value. The dominant use case. Individuals, corporations (notably Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, with ~250,000 BTC), and sovereigns hold BTC as a digital alternative to gold — credibly scarce, transportable across borders without permission, and outside any single jurisdiction's monetary policy.
• Settlement layer. Bitcoin is increasingly used as the settlement layer for high-value, infrequent transactions where finality and counterparty-free settlement matter more than speed.
• Payments via Lightning. The Lightning Network enables near-instant, sub-cent-fee payments, with growing adoption in regions facing currency instability and as a remittance rail.
• Collateral. BTC is the most widely accepted form of crypto collateral on both centralized and decentralized lending platforms.
• Reserve asset for ETFs. Spot Bitcoin ETFs (IBIT, FBTC, BITB and others) hold over a million BTC collectively, making the asset accessible through traditional brokerage accounts.

What Bitcoin is not used for: smart contracts, decentralized applications, NFTs (Ordinals are a niche overlay), or yield-generating staking. Anything that requires programmability runs on another network.

To read Bitcoin's tokenomics, look at the issuance schedule, the share of supply already in circulation, and the gap between market cap and fully-diluted valuation. At 95.4% of maximum supply already issued, the remaining issuance is a relatively small fraction of total potential supply. Sell pressure from future issuance is therefore limited.

The question that matters for a longer-term view is simple: does value accrual (burns, staking-yield reinvestment, deflationary mechanics, growing ecosystem TVL) run ahead of new issuance, or behind it? Ahead, and price can compound quietly; behind, and it leans on continuous fresh demand to soak up the supply.

At the macro level, the variables that move this asset class most are the direction of US interest rates, the supply of dollar liquidity, and the state of global risk appetite. Crypto has behaved like a long-duration, high-beta risk asset: it tends to rally when real yields fall and the dollar softens, and to sell off when liquidity tightens.

The cross-asset relationships worth watching: the dollar index (DXY), historically inversely correlated with crypto over longer windows; the 10-year Treasury yield, a proxy for the cost of risk capital; gold, which sometimes shares a "monetary hedge" framing with Bitcoin during regime changes; and the S&P 500, which during liquidity-driven moves often rhymes with crypto despite the "uncorrelated" narrative.

For Bitcoin specifically, the macro variable that has empirically led price most often is global crypto-market liquidity — proxied by stablecoin total supply, futures open interest, and exchange volumes. When these expand, BTC tends to follow; when they contract, the relationship typically reverses.

Risks specific to Bitcoin as a proof-of-work monetary network:

• Mining concentration. The top three mining pools collectively control more than 50% of global hashrate. While no single pool has historically acted maliciously, this concentration is a structural risk.
• Energy and regulatory exposure. Bitcoin mining's electricity footprint draws sustained political attention. Jurisdiction-specific bans (China 2021) historically caused short-term hashrate drops but did not damage the network long-term.
• Quantum computing (long-tail). A sufficiently advanced quantum computer could theoretically break elliptic-curve signatures. This is a multi-decade timeline and the community has actively researched post-quantum upgrades.
• Macro correlation. Despite its "uncorrelated asset" narrative, BTC has historically correlated with risk assets (Nasdaq) during liquidity contractions. Diversification benefits are real but not absolute.
• Custody. Self-custody requires operational diligence; loss of private keys is permanent. Custodial solutions reintroduce counterparty risk.
• Volatility. Bitcoin has historically delivered 60–80% annualized realized volatility — multiples higher than equities. Position-sizing must reflect this.