CryptoWeeklies / Glossary

What is TWAP in crypto?

TWAP stands for time-weighted average price. It is the average price an asset has traded at over a period, with every time interval counted equally — no weighting by volume, no weighting toward recent days.

What is a lifetime or expanding TWAP?

Most charts here use a lifetime or expanding TWAP: the window starts at the asset's first trading day and grows to today. Every new day is added to the average, so the line moves slowly and gets steadier as history accumulates.

Stocks are the exception. Bitcoin-treasury stocks and miners start theirs in January 2020, and AI, quantum and U.S.-market stocks use a rolling 200-week TWAP over their whole listed history, for the reason given in the Gravity Risk explainer.

That makes it useful as a baseline. It is not trying to track price; it is trying to describe the centre of gravity that price has traded around.

What does a TWAP premium or discount mean?

The number most pages show next to TWAP is the premium or discount — how far above or below that baseline the current price sits, as a percentage. An asset at +100% has doubled relative to its lifetime average. An asset at −30% is trading below it.

That percentage is also what feeds the Gravity Risk score.

Why use TWAP instead of a moving average?

A 200-day moving average tells you about the recent trend and forgets everything older. An expanding TWAP never forgets. They answer different questions, and this site publishes both — see the 200-week moving average explainer for the other one.

What are the limits of TWAP?

TWAP treats a thin, illiquid early year exactly as heavily as a deep, liquid recent one. For an asset whose first months were near-zero volume, the lifetime average is dragged down by prices almost nobody actually traded at. Newer assets have short, noisy baselines. Treat the number as context, not as fair value. The volume-weighted alternative is explained in VWAP vs TWAP.

Other models explained

• What is the 20-week moving-average risk level?
• What is the difference between the 200-day and 200-week moving average?
• What is the 200-week moving average?
• What is the altcoin season index?
• What is CAGR?
• What is a composite moving-average risk score?
• What is the crypto Fear & Greed Index?
• How is a crypto risk score calculated?
• Does dollar-cost averaging actually work?
• What is a Gravity Risk score?
• What is logarithmic regression?
• What is Cycle Position?
• How do you read a price forecast?
• What is a rainbow chart?
• What does Risk Level 1 to 10 mean?
• What are valuation bands?
• What is VWAP, and how is it different from TWAP?

See the live numbers for 149 assets →

Model track records: every weekly reading the site published, beside what the price did next.

Weekly data: each week's published readings, dated and citable.