A volume-weighted, market-wide measure of how volatile crypto actually is — the annualized 30-day realized volatility of the whole universe, weighted by trading notional. Paired with BTC & ETH implied vol (Deribit DVOL) and the variance risk premium.
When implied (amber) sits above realized (teal), options are pricing a premium (positive variance risk premium). When realized punches above implied, the market is moving faster than options expected — stress.
Realized vol = annualized 30d Garman-Klass. Percentile = where today's vol ranks in its own trailing 90d range (low = the calm before a move). Vol-target × = the size multiplier a vol-targeting strategy applies. Days since flip = consecutive days held in the current regime — today means it flipped on the latest bar, and a trailing + means the run started before the observable window, so it's a floor. Full universe + per-coin history via the API.
Percentiles are per coin, not market-wide. Every threshold above ranks a coin's current annualized Garman-Klass vol against its own trailing 90 days — so a 40%-vol BTC can read expanding while a 90%-vol memecoin reads compressed. The rules are checked in priority order (vol shock → expanding → compressed → mean reverting → normal) and the first match wins, which is why a coin in the top decile is always labelled a shock even if its term structure is also cooling.
The composite score is these shares, weighted. It starts at a neutral 50 and moves by each regime's share of the universe times the weight in the last column: 50 + 0.35·shock + 0.20·expanding − 0.20·compressed + 0.05·mean reverting, clamped to 0–100. Compressed is the only bucket that subtracts — a market coiling up scores calm. Today that lands at 52/100 · normal (≥70 stressed · 55–69 elevated · 45–54 normal · 30–44 calm · <30 dormant). Higher = size down.
Two lenses on the same risk.
Realized volatility measures how much price has actually moved — computed here from OHLC candles across the whole universe. Implied volatility is baked into options prices and reflects what the market expects next — for crypto that means BTC & ETH (the only coins with deep options), via Deribit's DVOL index.
The gap between them — the variance risk premium (implied − realized) — is a tradable signal. Persistently positive VRP rewards vol sellers; a collapse or flip to negative flags that realized vol is outrunning expectations, which often precedes deleveraging.
Wait — does crypto even have options? It does. Deribit runs the deepest crypto options market — roughly 80–90% of all crypto options open interest — with liquid BTC and ETH contracts; OKX, Bybit, Binance and the regulated CME list them too. DVOL is derived straight from that live BTC/ETH options book, the same way the VIX comes from S&P 500 options.
What crypto doesn't have is options on the long tail. Most alts have no real options market, so there is no implied vol to read for them. That is the whole reason this page is asymmetric: implied vol and the variance risk premium are a BTC & ETH story, while realized vol — measured from price alone — covers all 454 coins in the index.
curl -H "X-API-Key: cdk_live_yourkey" \ https://cryptodataapi.com/api/v1/volatility/index
Also: per-coin realized vol (/volatility/regime) and implied vol + term structure (/volatility/implied).