Bitcoin market sentiment
StressLine: Bitcoin Fear & Greed Index
A transparent daily measure of Bitcoin market sentiment, built from 12 market, derivatives and behavioural indicators.
The score shows where today's sentiment stands relative to the index's full history. A reading of 20 means sentiment is lower than about 80% of all past days.
How StressLine is built →Today's reading, updated daily. 0 = extreme fear, 100 = extreme greed.
Index history
Daily StressLine readings over time, with Bitcoin's daily close. The two lines are the equal-weighted (EW) and component-weighted (CW) versions.
The two versions usually move together, but they can diverge. This happens most often during sharp market stress, when derivatives indicators such as liquidations and implied volatility dominate the CW version. Comparing the index with price shows how sentiment behaved around major rallies and sell-offs — but a low reading is not a buy signal and a high reading is not a sell signal.
| Date | CW | EW | Regime (EW) | BTC / USD |
|---|
| Regime | Days | Share |
|---|
Where does today sit?
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Methodology
How StressLine is built
StressLine is a transparent composite sentiment index for Bitcoin. It combines market, derivatives and behavioural signals into one daily reading, from extreme fear to extreme greed.
Why StressLine
Bitcoin has no cash flows or physical value to anchor its price, so shifts between fear and greed can have a strong effect on it. That makes measuring market sentiment especially valuable. StressLine offers its own view of that sentiment. It combines market, derivatives and behavioural indicators, and it is built on an openly documented structure.
Three families of indicators
Market
How the price and the market itself behave
- Momentum
- Recent price performance. Rising prices signal greed.
- Volatility
- How sharply the price swings. High volatility signals fear.
- BTC relative strength
- Bitcoin's strength against Ethereum. Investors tend to move into Bitcoin when risk appetite falls.
- Trading volume
- The intensity of market activity.
- USDT dominance
- Tether's share of the stablecoin market. A rising share points to a flight to perceived safety.
Derivatives
How traders position themselves
- Funding rates
- What leveraged traders pay to hold long positions in perpetual futures. High funding means the crowd is betting on growth.
- Liquidation intensity
- Large price moves combined with heavy volume, a sign of forced position closures.
- Implied volatility (Deribit DVOL)
- The volatility options traders expect. This is the crypto counterpart of the VIX, the “fear index” of the stock market.
Behavioural
What people search for, read and discuss
- Google search sentiment
- Searches for greed-related terms compared with fear-related ones.
- Wikipedia views
- Public attention to the Bitcoin article.
- Reddit sentiment
- The tone of discussion in crypto communities.
- Developer activity
- Commits to Bitcoin Core on GitHub, a signal tied to the network's fundamentals rather than to price.
Each indicator is supported by existing sentiment indices or by academic research, and each is coded as a signal of either fear or greed.
Data
All data are collected automatically every day from public sources: Binance and Deribit for market and derivatives data, DeFiLlama for stablecoins, Google Trends, Wikipedia pageviews, Reddit and GitHub.
Normalised to current conditions
The raw indicators come in very different units: percentages, dollars, page views, commits. They cannot be added up directly. Each indicator is therefore standardised against its own recent history, using only past data. As a result, every reading shows how unusual today is compared with recent market conditions, and the index adapts as the market changes instead of measuring everything against one fixed historical norm.
Two weighting schemes
Equal-weighted
Each of the three families gets an equal share of the index, and each indicator within a family gets an equal share of that family's weight. This is the simple, fully transparent baseline, close to how most public Fear & Greed indices are built.
Component-weighted
Weights reflect how closely each indicator has been associated with large Bitcoin price moves. An indicator that has historically been more informative during periods of market stress carries more weight, even if this shifts the balance between families.
The two versions usually move together. They can diverge sharply during crises, and showing both lets you see how much the weighting choice matters.
Missing data
If an indicator is unavailable on a given day, the remaining indicators keep their relative weights and together make up the full index. A gap in one data source does not distort the reading.
Reading the 0–100 scale
The daily reading is ranked against the full available history of the index. Low values mean fear, high values mean greed. A score of 80 means today's sentiment is higher than about 80% of all past readings; a score of 10 means only about 10% of past days were more fearful.
The index is recalculated automatically once a day.
Based on the MBA thesis “Market Sentiment and Cryptocurrency Prices” by Elena Dorman, Ariel University, 2026.
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