What Is the Crypto Fear & Greed Index and How Do You Read It?
The Crypto Fear & Greed Index condenses market sentiment into a single 0–100 score: low values signal fear, high values signal greed. It blends volatility, momentum, volume and social signals into one number. Because crowds tend to be most fearful near lows and most greedy near highs, traders watch its extremes — and cross-check them against momentum gauges such as market-wide average RSI.
Published August 9, 2026 · Coinfuty — figures on this page are generated from Coinfuty’s aggregated live feed and refresh automatically. Latest update: August 9, 2026, 03:17 UTC.
What is the Crypto Fear & Greed Index?
The Crypto Fear & Greed Index is a sentiment gauge that compresses the mood of the crypto market into one number between 0 and 100. Zero is maximum fear — panic, capitulation, risk aversion — and 100 is maximum greed. Readings below about 25 are labeled Extreme Fear, and readings above about 75 Extreme Greed, with a neutral band around 50.
The premise behind it is old market wisdom quantified: crowds are most fearful after prices have already fallen and most greedy after they have already risen. The index does not say what an asset is worth. It says how the crowd currently feels — which is useful precisely because crowd emotion tends to overshoot in both directions. At publication on August 9, 2026, the index stood at 39 — Fear — while daily liquidations across the whole futures market had dropped to some of the quietest levels in weeks, a combination of cautious mood and low forced selling.
Where does crypto sentiment stand right now?
As of the latest update, the crypto Fear & Greed Index reads 39 — Fear. Average RSI across the 664 coins Coinfuty tracks sits at 57.1 on the 4-hour timeframe and 40.5 on the weekly. Over the same period, $67.20M in leveraged futures positions were liquidated market-wide.
The shape of that bar chart is the story: when short timeframes sit above the weekly, recent price action has been stronger than the longer trend, and vice versa. The same gauges live on the Coinfuty market overview, next to open interest and liquidation totals.
How is the Fear & Greed Index calculated?
It is a weighted blend of several measurable proxies for emotion. Exact recipes vary between publishers of the index, but the core inputs are broadly the same:
- Volatility — unusually large drawdowns versus recent averages read as fear.
- Momentum and volume — strong buying volume in rising markets reads as greed.
- Market dominance — rotation into Bitcoin from smaller coins is often treated as defensive, and rotation out as risk appetite.
- Social and search activity — spikes in crypto chatter and search interest typically accompany greed phases.
Each component is scored, weighted and averaged into the single 0–100 figure, usually refreshed daily. None of the inputs are derivatives-specific — which is worth remembering on a futures data site, because it means the index can be cross-examined against positioning metrics it does not see, such as funding rates or the long/short ratio.
What is market-wide average RSI?
RSI — the Relative Strength Index — measures the speed of recent price changes for a single asset on a 0–100 scale, where readings above 70 conventionally mean overbought and below 30 oversold. Market-wide average RSI takes that per-coin calculation and averages it across every tracked coin, turning a single-asset oscillator into a breadth gauge for the whole market.
The averaging changes how the scale behaves. One coin can easily print an RSI of 15 or 90; six hundred coins almost never do so in unison. A market-wide average in the low 40s therefore already describes broad, synchronized weakness, and one in the low 60s broad strength. The other useful property is timeframe layering: computing the average on 15-minute, hourly, 4-hour, daily and weekly candles shows whether short-term momentum is leading or lagging the bigger trend.
How do you read Fear & Greed and RSI together?
The two gauges answer different questions. Fear & Greed measures how the crowd feels; average RSI measures what prices are actually doing, across the breadth of the market. Agreement between them confirms a regime; disagreement is where the information is. An illustrative framework:
- Fear + weak RSI — mood and momentum agree on a downtrend; the reading is consistent, not contrarian.
- Fear + recovering RSI — prices have started moving up across many coins while sentiment stays depressed. A divergence often seen early in recoveries, before the crowd catches up.
- Greed + strong RSI — a trending market in full swing; the question becomes how stretched both can get.
- Greed + fading RSI — sentiment still euphoric while breadth quietly deteriorates. A divergence often seen late in rallies.
Right now the two gauges diverge: sentiment remains cautious even though short-term momentum across the market has already turned positive — the split described in the framework above.
How reliable is the Fear & Greed Index?
It is a thermometer, not a forecast. The index describes current conditions from inputs that are themselves reactions to price, so it is coincident at best and lagging at worst. Extreme readings can persist far longer than intuition suggests — entire bear market phases have traded under Extreme Fear for weeks at a time, and strong bull runs have held Extreme Greed while prices kept climbing.
Its other blind spot is leverage. Sentiment can look calm while derivatives positioning is stretched, and a liquidation cascade needs stretched positioning, not bad mood, to ignite. That is why the index works best as one panel in a dashboard — read alongside open interest, funding and long/short ratios rather than in isolation.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What does Extreme Fear mean in crypto?
A reading below roughly 25 on the 0–100 scale. It means the inputs the index tracks — volatility, momentum, volume and social activity — are all consistent with a market dominated by caution and risk reduction. Historically such readings cluster around local price lows, though they can persist for weeks in a sustained downtrend.
What value counts as Extreme Greed?
Roughly 75 and above. At those levels sentiment inputs show aggressive risk-taking: strong upward momentum, elevated volume and euphoric social activity. Extreme greed readings tend to appear late in rallies, which is why many traders treat them as a caution flag rather than a confirmation.
How often does the Fear & Greed Index update?
Typically once per day, since several of its inputs — such as search trends and social volume — are computed on daily windows. That makes it a slow gauge by crypto standards, which is exactly why pairing it with faster metrics like average RSI or funding rates adds information.
Is extreme fear a contrarian signal?
Many traders read it that way: when nearly everyone is fearful, much of the selling that sentiment implies may already have happened. But the index measures mood, not positioning — a market can stay fearful while leverage keeps unwinding. Contrarian readings are usually cross-checked against open interest, funding and liquidation data before anyone acts on them.
What RSI level is considered oversold?
By convention an RSI below 30 is oversold and above 70 is overbought. For a market-wide average the bar is effectively higher: because hundreds of coins are blended together, the average rarely reaches those extremes — a market-wide RSI in the low 40s already describes broad weakness.