A single on-chain indicator has quietly called every major Bitcoin cycle bottom for the past decade, and it is now approaching that important level once again.
The setup comes from a monthly Bitcoin chart paired with the NUPL indicator, which tracks whether the average holder is sitting on unrealized profit or loss. In each of the last three major bear market lows, the indicator fell into the same area and touched a rising trendline.
Nailing The Bitcoin Bottom
Bitcoin’s latest break above $70,000 and into the mid-$70,000s has seen a bullish mood slowly returning. The fear and greed index has improved, but one question is still unresolved. Has the market already found its bottom, or is another washout still ahead? Interestingly, a long-term reading of the Net Unrealized Profit/Loss, or NUPL, shows that the answer may lie in a pattern that has repeated across multiple market cycles.
NUPL is a clean sentiment gauge in Bitcoin analysis because it strips price action down to a question of whether holders, on average, are in profit or in pain. When the reading is high, the market is sitting on large unrealized gains. When it falls hard, those profits disappear, and losses dominate.
The monthly candlestick chart shows that Bitcoin’s major cycle lows have consistently formed when NUPL resets into deep territory and tags a long-term ascending support line. That happened at the 2015 cycle bottom, repeated again at the 2018 bear market low, and showed up once more around the 2022 bottom. Each of those touches came at points when sentiment had already been crushed, and the Bitcoin price had shed most of its previous gains.
The current NUPL reading of 22.9 represents a cryptocurrency that is still in modest aggregate profit, although it has shed a huge portion of the gains investors accumulated during the rally to the October 2025 peak above $126,000.
Is The Bottom Already In?
According to a crypto analyst that goes by the name CrypFlow on the social media platform X, the NUPL indicator is now approaching that level of Bitcoin bottoms again. If this pattern holds, Bitcoin may still need another deeper reset in sentiment before the market reaches a true long-term washout.
Price may have already corrected a lot, but the indicator shows the emotional capitulation seen at prior bottoms may not be complete yet. The NUPL might continue to push downwards and reach the trendline before a bottom is confirmed.
Related Reading: Analyst Says Bitcoin Bulls Have Won And This Is The Next Target
Although no single indicator can call every bottom with perfect precision, the NUPL leaves room for the possibility that one final price crash could still come before the next full cycle expansion begins. At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at $74,220, up by 1.3% in the past 24 hours.
