What the average coin last moved at — the whole network's cost basis, in dollars.
Every bitcoin has a last-moved price: the market price at the moment it most recently changed hands on-chain. Add all of those up and you get realized capitalisation — a valuation of the network not at today's price, but at the price each coin was last transacted. Divide that by circulating supply and you get realized price: the average cost basis of every coin in existence, as a single dollar figure.
It is one of the few Bitcoin metrics with no model, no assumption and no fitted curve in it. It is an accounting fact about the ledger.
Market price is what the marginal buyer will pay right now — set by the thin layer of coins actually for sale. Realized price is what the average holder paid. The gap between them is the network's aggregate unrealised profit or loss.
When market price sits well above realized price, the average coin is in profit and there is a large stock of gains that could be taken. When market price falls below realized price, the average coin is underwater — the market as a whole is holding at a loss.
Bitcoin has traded below its realized price in every bear market: 2011, 2015, 2018–19 and 2022. Those episodes were short relative to the whole history and lined up with cycle lows, which is why realized price is so often called a floor.
Read that carefully. It is a description of what has happened four times, not a mechanism that stops price falling. Nothing about the ledger forces a bid at the cost basis. The stat above — how many days in the entire series closed below realized price — is there to give the claim its actual weight rather than repeat it as folklore.
MVRV is market price divided by realized price. Same two numbers, expressed as a ratio instead of a level: realized price tells you where the cost basis is, MVRV tells you how far price has stretched from it. The MVRV Z-Score then standardises that stretch against its own history.
The Mayer Multiple looks superficially similar but shares no inputs at all — it compares price to a 200-day moving average of price, with no chain data involved. When the two disagree, it is because one is measuring distance from what people paid and the other distance from where price recently traded.
Read more: What MVRV Z-Score actually measures and every bear market measured.