A golden Bitcoin coin at the center of a network of connected data nodes, surrounded by chart and statistics panels against a dark tech background
Original illustration generated with AI — not representative of real data.

Free Bitcoin On-Chain Data, Mapped: MVRV, HODL Waves, and What Still Costs Money

NodeWitness Team 3 min read

Most "free on-chain indicators" roundups rank apps. This one maps the indicators themselves: what MVRV, HODL waves, and seven others actually measure, whether we calculate them ourselves, and the one place free access runs out.

Search "free on-chain bitcoin indicators" and you'll mostly get app rankings — five, ten, even twelve tools compared side by side, with little on what each metric is actually measuring or why it should matter to you. This page does the opposite: it's an index organized by indicator, not by app, with a link to the full technical breakdown for each one, and a straight answer on whether it costs anything.

Valuation indicators

We start with the ones that compare Bitcoin's current price to its own history — for all three read together, see how to tell if Bitcoin is cheap or expensive:

  • MVRV: market price vs. the average price each coin last moved at.
  • NUPL: unrealized profit or loss across the market as a whole — the same signal as MVRV, read a different way.
  • Puell Multiple: daily miner revenue vs. its own yearly average.
Map of free Bitcoin on-chain indicators grouped into three categories: valuation, network behavior and sentiment, vs. what's usually paid (exchange breakdowns, entity-adjustment)
Original diagram: a map of which Bitcoin on-chain indicators exist for free today, grouped by what they measure.

Network behavior indicators

  • HODL waves: what share of supply hasn't moved in a long time — when long-term holders stop selling, here's what that usually means.
  • Holder distribution by wallet size: how much supply each cohort controls, from small wallets to "whales."
  • Hash ribbon: a moving-average comparison of network hashrate, used as a miner capitulation signal — see the rest of the capitulation signals.

These three are the ones NodeWitness calculates directly from its own Bitcoin node, walking the full UTXO set, without relying on any third-party API, paid or free. A sanity check we ran before publishing any of it: the hashrate we calculated for October 2019 came out to ~103 EH/s, matching the network's known value for that date (~90-100 EH/s).

Sentiment and derivatives indicators

  • Fear and greed index: aggregated market sentiment, updated daily — see the most common mistake reading it.
  • Perpetual futures funding rate: cost of holding leveraged positions, an indicator of derivatives-market bias.
  • BTC dominance: Bitcoin's share of total cryptocurrency market capitalization.

Where the free tier actually ends

None of the indicators above have to cost anything — the underlying data is public or calculable from a node of your own. What paid platforms actually charge for is a different layer: very granular breakdowns by specific exchange, entity-adjustment (automatically grouping thousands of addresses belonging to the same real entity, considerable engineering work), and catalogs of thousands of metrics covering assets and markets well beyond Bitcoin. The difference isn't that the base data is secret — it's the depth, the volume, and the processing work behind it.

See the full pricing breakdown in our honest Glassnode comparison — and every indicator on this page, calculated and updated live, on the NodeWitness Cycle Score page and in the Supply, Network, and Market sections.

Last updated: August 31, 2026