Crypto Fear & Greed Index — Live

The Fear & Greed Index compresses the mood of the entire crypto market into one number between 0 and 100. Zero is panic — people selling because everyone else is selling. One hundred is euphoria — people buying because everyone else is buying. It is published daily by alternative.me, and it has become the market’s most-quoted sentiment gauge precisely because it is so easy to read.

This page gives you today’s reading, every reading since the index began in February 2018, and something most sentiment pages leave out: what Bitcoin’s price actually did in the weeks after each kind of reading.

The index since 2018

One number tells you today’s mood. The full history tells you whether today is actually unusual — which is the more useful question.

How often the market is actually afraid

Here is the first thing that surprises people: fear is not the exception. Across the index’s entire history the market has spent more days frightened than greedy.

This matters for how you read a headline. “Crypto Fear & Greed hits Fear” describes the market’s default state, not an emergency. Extreme readings at either end are the genuinely rare events, and they are rare in both directions.

What Bitcoin did next

The folklore is Warren Buffett’s line, borrowed: be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. It is repeated on every sentiment page on the internet, almost always without checking. So we checked — by crossing every reading since 2018 against Bitcoin’s own daily price series.

If that table does not look like the folklore, it is because the folklore is not what the data says. For most of this index’s life, average returns after greed readings have been better than after fear readings — the opposite of naive contrarianism.

The reason is momentum. Sentiment is not an independent signal that leads price; it is largely a description of recent price. Greed readings cluster inside uptrends, and uptrends have a habit of continuing. Fear readings cluster inside downtrends, and those continue too. Buying every fear reading in 2018 or 2022 meant buying repeatedly into a market that kept falling for another year.

Two honest caveats before anyone builds a strategy out of that table. The windows overlap heavily, so a single strong quarter lifts hundreds of rows at once and the observations are nowhere near independent. And the sample covers roughly two market cycles — enough to puncture a myth, nowhere near enough to establish a rule.

What goes into the number

The index is a weighted blend of six inputs, published by alternative.me:

• Volatility — 25%. Current volatility and drawdowns measured against 30- and 90-day averages. Unusual volatility is read as fear.
• Market momentum and volume — 25%. Buying volume and momentum compared with recent norms. Sustained high-volume buying is read as greed.
• Social media — 15%. Post volume and engagement rates on crypto hashtags.
• Surveys — 15%, currently paused. Weekly sentiment polls. This input is not being collected at present, so the live number is effectively built from the other five.
• Bitcoin dominance — 10%. Bitcoin’s share of total market cap. Rising dominance is treated as fear, on the logic that money retreats from altcoins into Bitcoin when risk appetite fades.
• Google Trends — 10%. Search interest in Bitcoin-related queries, with the shape of the query mattering: spikes in “bitcoin price manipulation” read very differently from spikes in “buy bitcoin”.

Note what that list is made of. Four of the six inputs are derived from price and volume, so the index is best understood as a well-packaged summary of recent market action rather than an independent read on what investors are thinking.

How to use it without fooling yourself

• Use it to calibrate, not to time. Its real value is telling you where the market’s mood sits relative to its own history, so you can notice when your own reaction is unusually strong.
• Watch duration, not the single reading. One day at 15 is noise. Six weeks pinned below 20 is a market in a different regime, and the streak counter above is there for that reason.
• Extremes are context for a plan you already have. If your plan says accumulate on weakness, extreme fear tells you weakness has arrived. It does not tell you the bottom is in — the index can sit at an extreme for months.
• Beware the asymmetry. Extreme fear is often resolved slowly and painfully; extreme greed is often resolved violently. Same distance from neutral, very different experience.
• Never trade the index alone. It contains no information about liquidity, positioning or leverage. Our liquidation tracker covers the leverage side, which is what turns a sentiment shift into a fast move.

What the index does not measure

It is a Bitcoin-weighted, retail-flavoured gauge, and it is worth being precise about its blind spots. It says nothing about derivatives positioning or how much leverage is in the system. It does not see institutional flows, treasury allocations or ETF creations. Its social-media component skews heavily toward English-language, retail-facing conversation. And because dominance is an input, a strong altcoin rally can nudge the index toward “fear” even while traders are behaving with obvious appetite for risk.

Treat it as one instrument on a dashboard. It is a good one. It is not the dashboard.

Frequently asked questions

How often does the index update?

Once a day. alternative.me recalculates it daily and the value stands for that whole day, which is why the gauge above will not move as you watch it. Our copy refreshes several times a day so a new reading appears here shortly after publication.

Does a reading of 10 mean I should buy?

The table on this page is the honest answer: historically, extreme fear has not been a reliable short-term buy signal, and 90-day outcomes after extreme fear have been notably weaker than the folklore promises. Extreme fear tells you the market is under stress. Whether that is an opportunity depends on your time horizon and your plan, not on the number.

Why is there a Fear reading when prices are rising?

Usually because volatility or dominance is pulling the average around. A sharp rally is itself volatile, and volatility is 25% of the index. Rising Bitcoin dominance also pushes the reading toward fear even in a rising market. The index is a blend, so any single component can pull against the price you are watching.

Is there an Ethereum or altcoin version?

Not in this index. Its volatility, momentum and dominance inputs are all Bitcoin-referenced, so it is best read as a Bitcoin-led measure of overall crypto sentiment. For how individual sectors are moving, our market heatmap breaks the market down by sector.

How far back does the data go?

February 2018. That start date is a real limitation: it means the index has never observed a full pre-2017 style cycle, and every conclusion drawn from it rests on roughly two cycles of evidence.

Where do the forward-return numbers come from?

We pair every historical index reading with Bitcoin’s daily average price from blockchain.com, then measure the change 30 and 90 calendar days later. The calculation is ours; the two underlying datasets are public. Nothing on this page is financial advice — see our risk disclaimer.