What Is the Crypto Fear and Greed Index?

On Friday 10 October 2025 the Crypto Fear and Greed Index published by Alternative.me read 64, which put it in the "greed" band. Later that day President Donald Trump announced an extra 100% tariff on Chinese imports and crypto prices dropped hard. More than $19 billion of leveraged positions were forcibly closed, the largest liquidation event the data tracker Coinglass had ever recorded. The next day's reading was 27.

That is a 37-point fall between two daily readings, with the label flipped from greed to fear. Look at the order of events, though: the crash came first and the number followed, which is how this index always works. This is an explainer, not financial advice.

Six inputs, one number

The index covers bitcoin only, and its public history starts on 1 February 2018 with a reading of 30. Alternative.me's methodology page lists six inputs, each scored against its own recent behaviour and then blended into a single figure between 0 and 100.

• Volatility, 25%: bitcoin's current volatility and maximum drawdowns are compared with their 30-day and 90-day averages, and an unusual jump counts as fear.

• Momentum and volume, 25%: heavy buying volume in a rising market, day after day, is read as a market getting too greedy.

• Social media, 15%: posts on the relevant hashtags get counted, along with how fast they pick up interactions.

• Surveys, 15%: weekly polls drawing 2,000 to 3,000 votes each, now marked on the page as paused.

• Dominance, 10%: when bitcoin's share of total crypto market value rises, the index reads it as people backing away from riskier altcoins, which is a fearful move, and a shrinking share reads as greed.

• Search trends, 10%: Google search interest in bitcoin-related queries, where the page's own example is a 1,550% jump in searches for "bitcoin price manipulation", read as a clear sign of fear.

With the surveys switched off, the live number comes from the other five, and the page does not say how the missing 15% is shared out. At least half the weight sits with volatility and momentum, both built from price and volume, so the index leans heavily on what the market has already done.

Each reading also gets a label: in the index's own history data, 25 and below is tagged extreme fear, 26 to 46 fear, 47 to 54 neutral, 55 to 75 greed, and 76 and above extreme greed. Neutral is the narrowest band at eight points wide, and only about one reading in eight has landed there since 2018.

Same name, different recipes

The stock market got there first. Journalists at what was then CNNMoney launched the original Fear and Greed Index in spring 2012, and CNN still publishes it. It blends seven equally weighted indicators, none of them a crypto measure: S&P 500 momentum, stock price strength, stock price breadth, the put/call options ratio, junk bond demand, market volatility as measured by the VIX, and the gap between stock and Treasury bond returns.

CoinMarketCap publishes its own crypto version, built differently again. It looks at price momentum across the ten largest coins excluding stablecoins, implied volatility for bitcoin and ether, the put-call ratio in bitcoin options, the stablecoin supply ratio, and CoinMarketCap's own data on social trends. Its bands are cut in even 20-point slices, so its neutral runs from 40 to 60.

Different inputs give different answers: on 10 October 2025, before the sell-off, Alternative.me read 64 (greed) and CoinMarketCap read 54 (neutral). A day later they showed 27 and 35, both fear and now eight points apart. Neither is wrong. They measure different things and give the result the same name. The gap can also shrink at the extremes: CoinMarketCap's version hit 5 on 6 February 2026, a day when Alternative.me read 9.

The extremes on record

Between 1 February 2018 and 5 October 2026 the index produced 3,165 daily readings, and they lean gloomy: about 23% fell in extreme fear and about 9% in extreme greed.

The longest run of extreme greed lasted 76 days without a break, from 6 November 2020 to 20 January 2021. It touched 95 several times along the way, the highest score the index has ever given, which it has reached on 12 days in total and never beaten.

The longest run of extreme fear was 74 days, from 6 May to 18 July 2022. Celsius froze customer withdrawals on 12 June, and on 18 June bitcoin fell below $20,000 for the first time since late 2020. The index bottomed at 6 that weekend, on 18 and 19 June.

The record low is 5, and it has been hit three times: once on 22 August 2019, a one-day plunge from 11 that bounced back to 33 the following day, and twice in February 2026, on the 12th and the 23rd, in the middle of a 46-day run of extreme fear.

By share of days, 2026 so far comes second only to 2022, when 207 of 365 readings were extreme fear. Of the first 278 readings of 2026, up to 5 October, 137 were extreme fear, including a 35-day run from 2 June to 6 July, and exactly one, a 78 on 22 September, was extreme greed. On the day this guide was written, 5 October 2026, the index read 70, which sits in its greed band.

What the index cannot tell you

It cannot tell you what happens next, because volatility and momentum, half its weight, compare bitcoin's latest moves with 30-day and 90-day averages, and the social and search inputs count what people have already posted and typed. Every part of it looks backwards.

It can also stay pinned at an extreme for weeks. The reading on 17 May 2022 was 8, about as low as the scale ever goes, and the index then stayed in extreme fear for another two months. Greed behaves the same way: the run that began in November 2020 sat above 75 for nearly 11 weeks, and no single day's number said how long it would last.

The scope is narrow, too: most of the inputs are bitcoin data, and altcoins only come in through bitcoin's share of total market value, so the number says little about any single altcoin.

And since there is no single fear and greed index, a headline quoting one without naming the provider leaves out how it was made. Read the number as a compressed summary of the past few weeks of price action and chatter. It is useful context when the market is lurching about, and it is no use as a plan.