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Bitcoin 200-Week Moving Average: The Line That Has Never Broken (Yet)

Chainmeter · ~2 min read

TL;DR

The 200-week moving average smooths price over roughly four years (about one full halving cycle) of weekly closes. Price has traded below this line only briefly in Bitcoin's history — each time near a deep bear-market low — making it one of the most closely watched long-term trend references, despite being a pure price-based metric with no on-chain component.

What's being averaged

The 200-week moving average takes weekly closing prices over the trailing 200 weeks (roughly 3.8 years) and averages them, producing a slow-moving trend line. Because 200 weeks is close to the length of one halving cycle, the line effectively smooths out an entire boom-and-bust cycle at a time, which is part of why it gets treated as a long-term reference, never as a short-term trading tool.

The "never broken" track record

Across Bitcoin's trading history, weekly closing price has dipped below its own 200-week moving average only during the deepest points of major bear markets — briefly in 2015, briefly in 2018, and briefly during the March 2020 pandemic crash. Each occasion was short-lived, with price recovering back above the line within weeks to a few months. That track record covers three or four discrete episodes across roughly 15 years of price history.

Reading the heatmap framing

This site displays the ratio of current price to the 200-week average as a heatmap-style gauge, coloring how stretched price is above (or how compressed it is below) its own long-run trend. This is purely a price-derived metric — it carries no on-chain cost-basis information the way MVRV or realized price does, which is why this site places it in the statistical tier, not the on-chain one.

Price's live ratio to its 200-week average, with every historical touch marked, is tracked on the 200-Week MA Heatmap.

A couple of things worth clarifying

200 weeks lines up with roughly one full halving cycle, which is part of why long-term Bitcoin observers gravitated toward this specific window — the average ends up smoothing across an entire boom-bust cycle instead of some arbitrary calendar period. Like Mayer Multiple, it's built entirely from historical price data; no blockchain or cost-basis measurement feeds into it.

None of that makes it a hard floor. It's a track record, not a guarantee: price has recovered above the line every time so far, across a small handful of episodes — which is meaningfully different from a mechanism that actually forces price to stay above it.