Nine color bands around a trend line fitted to bitcoin's real daily closes from the Bybit exchange. Pick where the fit ends, and the chart shows how the bands held up on the days the fit never saw.
White line: daily close. Dashed line: fitted trend. Colors: band 1 (blue, lowest) to band 9 (red, highest). Faded colors: days after the fit ends.
Point at the chart or tap it to read any day.
| Band | Range vs trend line | Days in the fit | Days after the fit |
|---|
The white line is bitcoin's daily close from November 14, 2018 to September 25, 2026 on a log scale, where a fall from $10,000 to $5,000 takes up the same space as a fall from $100,000 to $50,000. The dashed line is a trend fitted to those closes, and the nine colors fill the space around it: band 1 at the bottom marks the furthest bitcoin closed below the line during the fit period, band 9 at the top the furthest above. The four boxes above the chart show the last close, where the line stood that day, the gap between them and the band the close falls in.
Use the slider or the year buttons to end the fit earlier. The line and the bands are then calculated only from closes up to that date and carried forward in faded colors, the way someone using the chart back then would have seen them. The table counts the days in each band during the fit and after it, and you can point at the chart or tap it to read any single day.
The prices are daily closes of Bybit's BTCUSD contract, which Bybit's API documentation lists as an inverse perpetual quoted in US dollars. Its history starts on November 14, 2018, earlier than Bybit's BTCUSDT perpetual (March 25, 2020) and its BTC/USDT spot market (July 5, 2021). On the 1,909 days when both the contract and the spot pair traded, their closes differed by a median of 0.05% and by less than 0.5% on 99.8% of days.
The trend is a least squares line through log10 of each close against log10 of the days since the genesis block, the first bitcoin block, whose time stamp in Bitcoin Core's source code is January 3, 2009. A straight line on two log scales is a power law, price = 10a × daysb. Fitted to all 2,873 closes, the slope b is 5.02, and the line accounts for 77.3% of the variation in the log of the price (R² of 0.773).
The rainbow runs from the lowest close relative to the line during the fit period up to the highest, split into nine equal steps on the log scale. With the fit on all the data, band 1 starts 59.6% below the line, set by the close of $4,585.00 on March 12, 2020, and band 9 ends 251.7% above it, set by the close of $63,554.50 on April 13, 2021. Every close inside the fit period lands in one of the nine bands by construction.
A curve fitted to the past always looks good on the past. The test that matters is what happens after the last close used for the fit. This table ends the fit on each December 31 in the data and follows the line to September 25, 2026:
| Fit ends | Slope b | Line on Sep 25, 2026 | Days after the fit | Inside the rainbow | Above | Below |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dec 31, 2019 | 10.51 | $1,705,730 | 2,460 | 515 | 0 | 1,945 |
| Dec 31, 2020 | 6.45 | $184,832 | 2,094 | 1,527 | 256 | 311 |
| Dec 31, 2021 | 10.43 | $1,420,821 | 1,729 | 142 | 0 | 1,587 |
| Dec 31, 2022 | 6.68 | $239,128 | 1,364 | 1,265 | 0 | 99 |
| Dec 31, 2023 | 4.98 | $110,900 | 999 | 999 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 31, 2024 | 5.20 | $121,545 | 633 | 633 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 31, 2025 | 5.43 | $133,454 | 268 | 268 | 0 | 0 |
The slope ranged from 4.98 to 10.51 depending only on where the fit stopped. The fit that ended on December 31, 2021, less than two months after bitcoin's November 2021 high, put the line at $1.42 million on September 25, 2026, when bitcoin actually closed at $84,029. Bitcoin closed below that whole rainbow on 1,587 of the 1,729 days that followed. The fits ending in 2023, 2024 and 2025 kept every later close inside the bands. Their edges were set by the same two days as the full fit, the March 2020 low and the April 2021 high relative to the line, and no close since then has strayed further from the line, so far.
For other views of the same history, the bitcoin halving chart lines up the price around each halving, the bitcoin monthly returns heatmap shows every month since 2018, and the bitcoin investment calculator works out what a purchase on a past date was worth later.
Educational, not financial advice. The rainbow is a curve fitted to past prices for illustration. It does not predict future prices or recommend buying, selling or holding bitcoin.
No. This page fits its own line to Bybit's daily closes from November 14, 2018 to September 25, 2026 and sets the band edges from those closes. A rainbow chart built on a different price history or with different band widths puts the bands in different places, so the band numbers here only describe the position against this line.
A power law says the price grows with time raised to a fixed power: price = 10^a × days^b. On log scales it is a straight line, which is the trend line on this chart. With all the data, b is 5.02, so each doubling of the days since January 3, 2009 multiplies the line by about 32. Like the rainbow, it describes past prices and changes as new prices arrive.
It uses only real exchange prices downloaded with ccxt, and Bybit's BTCUSD history, the longest bitcoin price series on the exchange, begins on November 14, 2018. Older prices from other sources are not mixed in.
Bitcoin closed at $5,601.50 on the first day of this data and at $124,659.40 at its highest close, on October 6, 2025. On a normal scale the early years would look flat. On a log scale, equal percentage moves take up equal space, and it is also the scale the trend line is fitted on.
No. It shows where a price sits against a line fitted to past prices, and the line moves when new prices are added. The fit that ended in 2021 matched its own period more closely than any other year-end fit, with an R² of 0.839, and then missed by a wide margin. Use the chart to understand the history, not to time trades.