Bitcoin Rainbow Chart: how the live refit bands work

The Bitcoin Rainbow Chart draws Bitcoin's price on a logarithmic scale (each step up is a multiple, not a fixed amount) and lays coloured bands over it. The idea is simple: instead of asking whether the price is high or low in dollars, you ask where it sits compared with its usual range around a long-term trend.

The chart started in 2014 as a joke on Reddit, a rainbow drawn over a log-scale trend model that a Bitcointalk user had posted. It became popular anyway. Our version keeps the familiar nine band names but replaces the hand-picked 2014 offsets with bands measured from the price history itself.

Think of it as a rear-view mirror. It tells you where the price is right now relative to the past. It does not tell you where the price goes next.

Each band is a slice of Bitcoin's history, measured relative to the trend. The bottom band, Fire Sale, is the cheapest few percent of days. The middle band, Around Trend, straddles the trend itself. The top band, Maximum Bubble Territory, is the most expensive few percent. The table shows which slice of history each band covers.

The page also shows the current band as a label, and how many days have passed since price last left the rainbow. If price is outside every band, the headline says so and counts the days of the current excursion. The price shown is the latest closed UTC day, so it can be up to a day behind the live market. Further down the page, a table compares how much time price was supposed to spend in each zone with how much it actually did, over all history, over the last four years, and on data the model had not yet seen.

The trend is a curve fitted to the logarithm of Bitcoin's daily closing price against the logarithm of the number of days since the first Bitcoin block (3 January 2009). The curve has a bend in it, so it can flatten over time the way Bitcoin's growth actually has. The classic model used a straight line, which is why its bands drift away from the price year after year.

The nine bands sit between ten boundary curves. Each curve is fitted so that a set share of all past days closed below it: 1%, 5%, 15%, 30%, 40%, 60%, 70%, 85%, 95% and 99%. Because Bitcoin's swings have got smaller each cycle, the curves move closer together and the rainbow narrows over time. Below the 1% curve and above the 99% curve is open space: the chart never paints a band there, and never draws bands into the future.

If the main fit fails its own checks (for example, if a curve cannot be fitted, or the rainbow would not narrow over time), the model falls back to a simpler version: the median trend plus or minus a fitted, shrinking spread. Tiny crossings between neighbouring curves in the sparse early years are repaired rather than triggering the fallback. The page tells you when the fallback variant is active. The fit and the price shown use closed UTC days only, so today's unfinished candle is left out.

Prices are daily closes. Older history comes from a stored price file that ships with the tool. Newer days are added from Binance daily candles, with CoinGecko closing prices as a backup when Binance cannot be reached. Because Binance blocks some cloud servers, the backup may be what supplies the most recent days.

The page is rebuilt at most once an hour, and the fit is recalculated each time. In practice the curve barely moves within a day. The page also shows how far the bottom boundary has moved over the past 30 days of refits, so you can see how much the model itself shifts.

The Time Machine and the out-of-sample column of the calibration table come from stored files that are generated offline, not on every page view. They hold one model refit for each month since January 2013, and their own generation date can lag behind today. The all-history and last-four-years columns are recalculated with the live fit. Treat the stored results as a snapshot of how the method behaved, not as a live reading.

The Excursion Ledger lists the times price left the rainbow entirely, above the top band or below the bottom one. Episodes that lasted a week or more get their own card with the start and end date, the number of days, the maximum distance from the band edge, and the price change over the 90 days after the episode ended. The page shows the eight most recent cards. Shorter blips are summarised in one line. The ledger is a record of what happened, and the sample is tiny by construction.

The "+ Classic 2014" toggle adds the nine boundaries of the old frozen model as dashed lines, so you can see how far a hand-picked recipe drifts from the data.

The Time Machine lets you drag back to a past month and see the rainbow as it was fitted using only data up to that month, with the later price ghosted. Preset buttons jump to the 2013, 2017 and 2021 tops and the 2022 bottom. It lets you compare earlier versions of the rainbow with what came after, which is a fair way to judge any curve fit.

The rainbow is a description, not a prediction. Keep these in mind before you read anything into a band.

A made-up example. You open the chart and see the current band label is Cheap, and the headline says it has been many days since price last left the rainbow. You switch on the Classic 2014 toggle and notice the old dashed boundaries sit well away from the price, which tells you why that recipe is no longer a good reference.

You then drag the Time Machine back to a past cycle top and compare the rainbow of that moment with what followed. That reminds you to treat today's band as context only. To look at the same moment from another angle, you could check the Bitcoin risk score, or test a plan in the DCA simulator. If you are weighing how to act when the market is fearful, our guide on DCA during extreme fear goes further.

The Bitcoin Rainbow Chart is a public page. You can open it without an account, and the full chart, the bands, the Excursion Ledger, the Classic 2014 toggle, the Time Machine and the calibration tables are all included. Nothing on this page is locked behind Premium. This explainer is free to read for everyone too.

Other tools on the platform do have a Premium side. See pricing for what is included today.