Four Free In-House Crypto Tools: How They Work and What They Can't Do

People keep asking what the fear and greed index and the Bitcoin market thermometer quoted in my posts actually are, how the numbers are computed, and whether they can be trusted. Rather than answering one comment at a time, here is the full explanation. All four tools — the fear and greed index, the market thermometer, the futures calculator and the compound interest calculator — are built and computed in-house. Free, no login, no personal data collected. This article covers how each one works, how to read it, and what it cannot tell you.

The alternative.me fear and greed index is the industry veteran, but it updates only once a day, mixes in subjective inputs like search trends and surveys, and its API has flaky days. I wanted a version that updates faster, has a fully transparent formula, and can be verified by anyone at any time — so I wrote one.

Same story for the market thermometer. On-chain indicators like MVRV and NUPL are scattered across half a dozen data sites; checking them all means eight browser tabs plus guessing where each value sits in its own history. Compressing them into one number with a consistent method — that is the whole point of the thermometer.

Our fear and greed index blends four components: Bitcoin 24-hour momentum at 35%, 7-day trend at 25%, volatility at 20% and volume at 20%. It recomputes every hour and outputs an integer from 0 to 100: 0 is extreme fear, 100 is extreme greed, around 50 is neutral. On the day this article was written it read 51 — neutral.

Compared with the alternative.me version, ours updates hourly rather than daily, and the formula contains no surveys or search-trend inputs — price and volume data only. The two versions often disagree; neither is wrong, they simply measure differently.

The index also ships with a free open API. No registration, no key, no CORS restrictions — developers can call it directly from their own pages and widgets.

The thermometer updates daily. It takes nine classic on-chain indicators — MVRV-Z, AVIV, NUPL, the Puell Multiple, the Mayer Multiple, SOPR, price-to-CVDD, price-to-long-term-holder cost basis, plus our in-house fear and greed index — converts each into its percentile within roughly four years of history, then averages them with equal weight into a single 0-100 "temperature".

Reading it is simple: 0 is freezing, 100 is overheated, around 50 is normal. Below 35 the page labels it "cool", above 65 "hot". On the day of writing it read 22° — cool, meaning these nine indicators currently sit broadly in the lower range of their four-year history. That is a description of the present, not a signal of any kind.

The thermometer page also shows each of the nine components with its own reading and percentile, so you can see exactly which indicator pulls the temperature up or down. The historical temperature series is archived continuously — a dataset unique to this site.

The futures calculator answers three questions: what is my profit or loss if price reaches a given level; where is my liquidation price; and given my capital and risk tolerance, how large a position can I open.

Example: 1,000 USDT of margin, 10x long, entry at 64,000 — the calculator shows roughly where liquidation sits and how much your account moves for every 1% of price movement. Plenty of liquidations happen not because the direction was wrong but because the trader never checked how close the liquidation price was. Thirty seconds of arithmetic before the order is the cheapest risk management there is.

The compound interest calculator takes three inputs — starting principal, recurring contribution, and an assumed annual return — and instantly shows the end value for any number of years, with principal and gains displayed separately.

Its job is not to tell you what you will earn; nobody knows future returns. It is to make two things visible: how much time matters to compounding, and how dramatically the outcome shifts when the return assumption moves a few percentage points. Testing a range of assumptions beats guessing every time.

Having covered what they do, the limits matter just as much.

The fear and greed index and the thermometer are descriptive indicators: they tell you where current sentiment and on-chain levels sit relative to history, not where the market goes next. History has repeatedly produced fear that got more fearful and heat that got hotter; no single reading is a basis for action.

On-chain indicators also lag: the data settles daily, and in violent markets price moves far faster than the indicators. The futures calculator computes the mathematical liquidation price; real liquidations are also affected by funding rates, insurance funds and wick hunts, so live results will differ. The return rate in the compound calculator is your assumption — the tool does arithmetic, not prophecy.

In short: the tools lay out facts and math. The decision is always yours, and so is the risk.