CVDD builds a structural price floor from "coin-days destroyed" — a measure that weights spent coins by both their value and how long they'd been held. Every major Bitcoin cycle bottom has landed within a few percent of the CVDD line (1.0x), making it one of the more precise floor estimates available.
What Is CVDD?
Cumulative Value-Days Destroyed is built around a specific idea: not all spent coins carry equal signal. A coin that was held for five years before being sold represents a much stronger, more deliberate market statement than a coin bought and sold within a day. CVDD weights spent coins by exactly this — both their dollar value and how long they'd been held — and accumulates that weighted measure over Bitcoin's entire history to build a rising structural floor.
Understanding Coin-Days Destroyed
"Coin-days destroyed" is a concept used across several on-chain metrics: for any spent coin, multiply its value by the number of days it sat unmoved before being spent. A coin worth $1,000 that sat for 100 days before selling "destroys" 100,000 coin-days. This weighting scheme deliberately amplifies the signal from long-held coins moving — treating that as a more meaningful market event than routine short-term trading — while letting rapid, low-conviction trading contribute comparatively little.
Why It Works as a Floor
CVDD's accumulated, ever-rising nature is exactly what makes it function as a structural floor rather than a reactive indicator. Because it sums coin-days destroyed across Bitcoin's entire history, it only ever grows — it doesn't reset or decay the way a moving average would. That gives it a genuinely different character from most other indicators on this site: it represents a kind of accumulated "network memory" of past long-term holder capitulation events, rather than a snapshot of current conditions.
The empirical result has been remarkably tight: across multiple Bitcoin cycles, the eventual bear-market bottom has landed within a narrow band of the CVDD line — historically within a few percent of 1.0x on the Price/CVDD ratio.
Reading the Price/CVDD Ratio
Our indicator page tracks the ratio between spot price and the CVDD floor:
| Price / CVDD | Zone | Historical Interpretation |
|---|---|---|
| Below 1.2x | Near Floor | Every major cycle bottom has landed within a few percent of 1.0x |
| 1.2x – 2.8x | Fair Value | Normal historical range, no extreme signal |
| 2.8x – 5.0x | Elevated | Recent cycle tops (2024, 2025) landed here — tamer than earlier cycles |
| Above 5.0x | High Risk | The steepest historical tops — 2017's blow-off reached ~11x |
See today's live Price/CVDD Ratio on our CVDD indicator page.
Limitations
It's a floor concept, not a ceiling one. CVDD's track record is specifically about bottoms — it has no equivalent precision at identifying tops, which is why the Price/CVDD ratio's high-risk thresholds are considerably wider and less exact than its near-floor zone.
It's a permanently rising line. Because CVDD accumulates rather than resets, its absolute level continually rises over time — always compare it as a ratio to price, not as a standalone number.
A tight historical pattern isn't a guarantee. Like the 200-week moving average's perfect record, CVDD's tight clustering around past bottoms is a strong empirical pattern from a still-limited number of full market cycles, not a mathematical certainty for the next one.
How to Use It
CVDD is best used as a deep-value confirmation tool — when price approaches the CVDD floor at the same time other capitulation-style indicators (NUPL below zero, SOPR deeply negative) are also flashing extremes, that agreement across differently-constructed metrics is considerably more meaningful than any one signal alone.
It's also one of the 21 inputs to our Cycle Compass composite score.
For a broader tour of the other major indicators worth knowing, see our guide to 10 On-Chain Bitcoin Indicators Every Investor Should Know.