Key points: Bitcoin profit metric offers first bull signal in ten months The latest data from onchain analytics platform CryptoQuant has led its CEO, Ki Young Ju, to call time on Bitcoin’s 2026 bear market.
In an X post on Wednesday, Ki flagged the first positive reading on CryptoQuant’s Bull/Bear Market Cycle Indicator since early October. “The Bitcoin bear cycle is over,” he wrote in accompanying commentary
The indicator is derived from the P&L Index — initially devised by CryptoQuant’s head of research — and measures the P&L Index’s distance from its 365-day moving average. The P&L Index itself is composed of several onchain profitability metrics: the market value to realized value (MVRV) ratio, net unrealized profit/loss (NUPL) and the spent output profit ratio (SOPR). Together they provide an overall picture of Bitcoin investors’ realized and unrealized profits and losses.
Values above zero for the Bull/Bear indicator point to bullish phases in the BTC price cycle as profitability improves. Current cycle lows came on Feb. 5 as BTC/USD fell to $60,000, with a reading of -1.244 corresponding to “extreme bear” conditions. As of Aug. 26, the most recent date for which full data is available, Bull/Bear displayed a positive reading of 0.042, placing it in its “bull” bracket.