Flows

Exchange netflow (z-score)

Today's netflow compared against what has been normal over the past month, in standard deviations — the form in which the number becomes readable and alertable.

Why it matters

"12,000 BTC came in" means nothing on its own: it could be an ordinary day or the largest move of the year, depending on the era. The z-score answers the only question that helps you decide: is this unusual compared to the last few weeks? That's why this metric, not the raw figure, is the one that fires alerts in the project, and why it fires in BOTH directions: a huge outflow is as worth looking at as a huge inflow, even though they mean opposite things.

Build it yourself

Drag today's flow and the last month's normal behaviour, and see when the alert would fire.

z = (Today's netflow − 30d mean) ÷ 30d stdev
Netflow z-score

Magnitude (|z|), which is what the alert compares:

Illustrative example numbers for practice — not real data.

How it's calculated, step by step

  1. The window of the 30 days BEFORE the day being scored is taken — it does not include that day itself, so an extreme value can't inflate its own denominator.
  2. The mean and standard deviation of that window's netflows are computed. At least 14 days of history are required; with fewer, nothing is written.
  3. z = (today's netflow − mean) ÷ standard deviation.
  4. The project warns when |z| exceeds 2 and marks it critical from 3 — both thresholds are hot-configurable.
Coincident signal. An alert firing means "this is unusual", not "price is about to move". The project tested flows as a predictive signal source under its corrected method and found no defensible edge; this metric's real value is monitoring, not forecasting. And today the chart below comes out empty for a mechanical reason: at least 14 days of accumulated netflow are needed before the first z-score can be computed, and the source series has only just started.

Chart

This is real Bitcoin data, computed from the blockchain — not the illustrative example above.

Data last updated on 2026-09-09.

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