Bitcoin BTC

What BTC actually is on-chain

Bitcoin is not a token issued on someone else's network — it settles on Bitcoin, which means there is no contract address to verify and no issuer who can freeze or reissue it. Supply and transfer rules are enforced by the chain's own consensus, so the risks worth tracking are protocol risks (client bugs, hash-rate or validator concentration) rather than token-contract risks.

4 other assets tracked on this site also use the ticker BTC: Bitcoin Base (Base, 0xfaf1…4709); Bitcoin AI (BNB Chain, 0xf22a…0854); Bitcoin Second Chance (BNB Chain, 0x0afc…eda6); batcat (Solana, EtBc6g…1R4X). The asset on this page is the one that settles on Bitcoin. These are unrelated tokens with separate contracts, separate supply and separate price histories — a price alert set on one of them says nothing about the others, and a ticker search is not enough to tell them apart.

For BTC the project publishes a whitepaper, a public source repository and an active account as @bitcoin. Both a written specification and readable code exist, which is a materially higher bar than most assets in this size range clear. None of it is a quality judgement about the asset; it is simply what can be independently checked before the chart is worth looking at.

Where BTC sits in the market

Bitcoin is ranked #1 by market capitalisation, in the very top of the table. At that size the binding constraints are not liquidity but custody, index membership and regulated venue access — books are deep enough that a retail-sized order almost never moves the printed quote, and the spread between two major venues is usually a few basis points. The trade-off is correlation: BTC is close to the market benchmark itself, so it responds to funding conditions and to flows into the asset class more than to project-level news.

CryptoPingAi is currently streaming 10 live BTC order books (Binance, Bybit, OKX, Coinbase, Gate.io, MEXC…). That is wider coverage than most assets ranked near #1 carry, so a divergence on any one of them is far more likely to be a local liquidity event than a genuine repricing. Coinbase carries it, so BTC is reachable from a regulated US venue — that widens the participant set and tends to keep the quote honest during US hours specifically. One of them is a Korean won market, so the Kimchi-premium spread between the KRW and USDT quote is visible on this page.

BTC against its all-time high

BTC is 37.6% below its $126,080 peak (on 2025-10-06), roughly a halving of value from the high. 1.60x is needed to get back, and the band between here and there is thick with supply bought during the run-up. Rallies into that zone tend to meet holders getting back to break-even rather than buyers initiating, which is why the first push toward the high usually fails before the second one. That high was set about a year ago, recently enough that it still anchors how most current holders frame the asset.

BTC across its historical range

BTC has traded across a 1,859x range, between $67.81 and $126,080. Any volatility figure quoted for this asset depends heavily on which part of that range it is measured over.

Spot is roughly 1,160x above the $67.81 low (on 2013-07-06). The practical consequence is a cost-basis distribution skewed by orders of magnitude: a slice of the supply was acquired at a price that rounds to zero against today's, and that supply is price-insensitive on the way up. Rallies in an asset like this do not fail because demand disappears — they fail because early supply meets them.

BTC supply structure

Of a capped 21.0 million BTC, 20.0 million is circulating — 95.4% issued, with 972,819 still to be created. The remaining issuance is small enough that emission is a second-order influence on price, but the schedule still matters for anyone modelling multi-year supply.

What kind of asset BTC is

Bitcoin is a base-layer network, so BTC is simultaneously the chain's security budget and its unit of account rather than a claim on a business. Only 22 tracked tokens are tagged to its ecosystem, so this is not primarily an application platform. Assets like this are valued on the base network's own use — settlement, payments or monetary demand — rather than on app-layer activity, which makes the app-ecosystem metrics people quote for smart-contract chains largely irrelevant here. Because it is secured by proof of work, new BTC arrives on a fixed schedule and is paid to miners who carry real energy costs — a structural, price-insensitive source of sell pressure that proof-of-stake chains do not have.

CoinGecko files BTC under 8 categories, including Layer 1 (L1), FTX Holdings, Proof of Work (PoW), Bitcoin Ecosystem, GMCI 30 Index. Worth flagging from the metadata: BTC was held on FTX's balance sheet and remains part of the estate's distribution, and is a constituent of the GMCI 30 Index.

How to set a Bitcoin alert that is worth receiving

Bitcoin settles on its own Bitcoin base layer — quoted on 10 venues we stream — high dated 2025-10-06 — rank #1. On this profile the condition that carries signal is round-number price thresholds plus daily-candle RSI extremes.

Full alert-design method: thresholds, RSI/MACD and volume conditions →