I keep the supply-in-profit chart closer than any other Bitcoin cycle indicator. Benjamin Cowen's June 2026 video makes the case for it: you can judge where Bitcoin sits in its cycle from the blockchain itself, without following the news. He works through the on-chain risk gauge on intothecryptoverse.com, a single 0-to-1 number built from nine on-chain metrics, and reads a total risk of 0.198 as the kind of print that has mostly appeared in midterm years.
What on-chain data actually is
Bitcoin keeps one public record of every transaction. On-chain data is that record counted and sorted: how many coins moved on a given day, how long the coins that moved had sat still, what miners earned for finding blocks and what fees they collected for including transactions. No company filing or survey sits behind it, and no reporter decides what to disclose.
Price tells you what a buyer paid this afternoon. The ledger tells you about the people already holding: whether coins are changing hands at a profit or a loss, whether old coins are waking up, whether miners still get paid enough to keep the machines running. The creator wants one number that sums up that picture, without reading a headline about inflation, initial claims or geopolitical conflict. I keep that distinction in mind whenever a single metric gets treated as a verdict on where price goes next.
The narrow view has a limit. On-chain data covers settlement on Bitcoin itself. Exchange trading, futures, options and every other off-chain contract show up only indirectly, when coins move to or from a venue. A gauge built from the ledger measures the behaviour of coins and miners, not the whole market.
To line many metrics up against each other, each one is normalized. Take a metric's full history, squeeze it onto a scale from 0 to 1, where a low reading sits at the calm end of its own record and a high reading sits at the heated end. Stack several together and you get the total on-chain risk figure. The chart is a historical backtest, and that word matters: the levels come from fitting the data to past cycles.
The supply-in-profit chart and its one to four month window
The starting point is the Bitcoin percentage of supply in profit and loss. In plain terms it is the share of all coins in existence whose last move happened at a price below today's. When price falls, that share falls with it, and when enough coins sit under water the line crosses over.
The creator watches that cross for timing. "Historically, within about 1 to 4 months of crossing, Bitcoin finds the low for the market cycle." He says he went back through every past bear market to check the window, and that the low arrived inside it each time.
A window is not a date, and the exit is not always clean. He points to a bear market where the cross came in June, reversed, and then came again later in the same year. He is unsure whether that double cross happened in 2018 or 2022, and the year matters less than the pattern it shows.
What I take from the chart is the direction of the argument rather than its precision. Coins sliding from profit into loss is a sign that holders are stressed, and stress has clustered near cycle lows. Whether the low arrives one month later or four is not something a share of supply can tell you on its own.
From a chart to a 0 to 1 risk score
Normalization is where a chart becomes a gauge. The supply-in-profit series is mapped between 0 and 1 so the current reading can be compared with prior cycles. The normalized version looks almost identical to the raw chart, and the creator says as much.
Normalizing adds no information to a single metric. It puts that metric on a scale you can place beside others whose units have nothing in common, like a ratio of miner revenue and a share of coin supply. Once every series speaks the same 0-to-1 language, they can be averaged.
That is what allows a total. Each series is scored against its own history, then the scores are combined under whatever weights the user sets. If the supply line sits at the calm end of its range and the miner metrics do too, the total lands low. If coin-age metrics are heating up while miner metrics stay cool, the total lands somewhere in the middle and you have to look at the parts.
The nine metrics inside the total risk number
Supply in profit and loss is one indicator among many. Nine series feed the total on-chain risk shown on the dashboard.
- Percentage of supply in profit and loss: the share of coins whose last move came at a lower price than today's.
- MVRV Z-Score: market value set against realized value, the aggregate price holders paid, then scaled by the metric's own history.
- Puell Multiple: miner revenue against its one-year average, a read on how stretched miner income has become.
- MVRV Score: a variant of the market-value-to-realized-value comparison.
- Miner Cap to Thermo Cap Ratio: a ratio that compares a miner-value measure with cumulative miner revenue.
- Transaction Fees: what users pay for block space, watched as a sign of demand for the chain.
- Market Cap to Thermo Cap Ratio: market value against that same cumulative miner revenue.
- Terminal Price: a model price built from coin-age data.
- RHODL Ratio: the value of recently moved coins set against older ones.
Each one watches a different group. Miner metrics follow the people who spend real money on electricity and hardware. Coin-age metrics follow holders, and separate the coins that moved last week from the ones that have not moved in years. Supply in profit follows the cost basis of the whole float. When several of them agree, the reading carries more weight than any one alone.
The creator is careful about what a combined score can claim. He notes that some of these series did not reach the top of their range in the last bull market, and calls that a property of the market. A metric that covers a handful of cycles cannot promise that the next one repeats the shape of the last.
How weights and the re-normalize toggle change the reading
The dashboard's total is not fixed. The legend lets you toggle each risk chart on or off, and a field above the chart sets the weight of each metric. A weight of 0 removes that metric from the calculation completely. A weight of 0.5 makes it contribute half as much as before.
By default the chart shows the true average of the underlying on-chain risk values. A second option, labelled Re-normalize Average, maps that average back onto a 0-to-1 historical scale.
Two people can open the same page and see different numbers. If someone sends you a screenshot of a low on-chain risk reading, ask which metrics were switched on and what weights were applied. Without that, the number is hard to place. I think this is the most practical thing to learn from the dashboard: the gauge is a tool with settings.
Individual components can also be read alone, and some have a cleaner record than the average. The creator singles out terminal price. He says terminal price risk has so far always reached 0 at market cycle bottoms and above 0.9 at market cycle peaks, assuming the most recent significant peak was in April 2021. That assumption is doing visible work.
Reading 0.198: why sub-0.2 prints cluster in midterm years
With every series switched on, total on-chain risk stood at 0.198 in June 2026. The numbers named in the discussion are collected below exactly as given.
| Reading | Figure |
|---|---|
| Total on-chain risk, June 2026 | 0.198 |
| Level below which readings are rare | 0.2 |
| MVRV Z-Score risk at the 2019 top | 0.5 to 0.6 |
| Terminal price risk at cycle bottoms | 0 |
| Terminal price risk at cycle peaks | above 0.9 |
| Time from supply-in-profit cross to cycle low | about 1 to 4 months |
Bitcoin does not spend much of its history under 0.2, according to the creator. When it does, the readings cluster in midterm years, and sometimes late in the midterm year heading into the early part of the pre-election, pre-halving year. He points out that 2026 is a midterm year, which is where he places the market.
That is why he calls the print normal rather than alarming. A low reading in a midterm year fits the pattern the backtest shows. What he wants to see next is the gauge carving out a low that lasts a few months, as it has in past bear markets, ideally before the end of the year. A low that holds would, in his reading, set the market up for the next bull phase.
The 2019 comparison behind the bear market call
The case does not rest on the risk gauge alone. By his account, Bitcoin topped about two months before quantitative tightening ended in both 2019 and 2025. Quantitative tightening is a central bank shrinking its balance sheet, which withdraws liquidity from the financial system. He also says there was no rotation into altcoins in either period, meaning the money that came into crypto stayed in Bitcoin instead of spreading down the list. He counts three rate cuts in the earlier stretch, as in 2025.
The MVRV Z-Score fits the same story. He asks when that metric last topped out around 0.5 to 0.6 on the risk scale, and answers that it was the 2019 bull market. He describes that top as apathetic, meaning price and on-chain heat faded without the blow-off finish people expect, and says it was the only one of its kind.
From there he argues that what Bitcoin is doing now resembles the digestion phase after the apathetic 2019 top. I find the comparison suggestive, and also a little circular: the similarities were selected after the fact, from a long list of macro and market markers. That argument assumes the liquidity cycle rhymes with the last one, and it assumes the absence of an altcoin rotation means the same thing both times.
What the creator expects next
At the time of publication, the creator expected Bitcoin to bottom in 2026. He says the gauge supports the call he made in an earlier video, that Bitcoin is in the third and final stage of the bear market, and he names October as the most likely month for a low while allowing that it could come at any moment.
He describes his current stance as time-based capitulation, a slow grind that wears holders out rather than a sharp crash, and says he would pivot to price-based capitulation if the market delivered one. That distinction matters: the two paths look very different on a chart, and only one involves a violent low.
There is also a longer-range point. If the move that just ended really was the 2019 analogue, the next bull market could be the euphoric one, with a top that pushes the risk gauge higher than it went this cycle. He offers that as a possibility, not a forecast with a date, and says he hopes the gauge proves useful in the next bull market.
What to check before you rely on the reading
The metric has a track record the creator is open about, and limits he states himself. "This metric does not promise that you will go all the way to the top in every bull market." The 2019 top, where the MVRV Z-Score peaked near 0.5 to 0.6 and never approached the top of its range, is the example. A high reading is not a sell signal with a timer attached, and a low reading is not a buy signal with one either.
Three other things sit underneath any reading. The levels came from fitting a small number of past cycles, and each new cycle adds one observation. The weights are adjustable, so the headline number depends on choices a user can change. And the timing signal has fired twice in a single bear market before, so one cross is not the same as a confirmed low. He does not explain the formula behind each component or how the default weights were chosen, so check the methodology on the site before you lean on a single number.
What I would watch, in order:
- Whether total on-chain risk stays below 0.2 long enough to form a multi-month low, rather than dipping for a day and bouncing.
- Whether the supply-in-profit line crosses and stays crossed instead of reversing, as it did in the double-cross case the creator describes.
- Whether terminal price risk falls toward 0, the level the creator says it has reached at every cycle bottom in its record.
- Which metrics were switched on and which weights were used, including the Re-normalize Average option, before comparing your reading with anyone else's screenshot.
0.198 is a normalized reading of where the ledger sits relative to its own past. Whether it becomes the multi-month low the creator wants depends on the next few months, and October is the month he names.
