# Well this looks familiar...

A lot of people base on whether we are in a bull market in bitcoin or not based on the price, and they should.

That's pretty much what defines whether something is in a bull market or a bear market.

However, there are some other non price metrics that are fun to look at from time to time that also tend to line up with bull and bear markets.

I have touched on a few of them on posts in the past and I am going to touch on another one today...

This one being: Exchange Deposits Fee Dominance Index.

It's a mouthful I know, but it will become much more clear later on in the post and not sound nearly so confusing.

# Awesome, so what's the Exchange Deposits Fee Dominance Index?

In a nutshell, it's a 7 day average of the percentage of miners fees spent on transactions that send bitcoin to centralized exchanges.

For example if 2% of miners fees were being spent on transactions sending bitcoin to exchanges that index reading would be a 2%.

Ok, so now that you understand what it is, lets take a look at the current readings on this index...

![image.png](https://images.hive.blog/DQme1zNKkybp2P9CWLFtuLYzem8LZjZzADZgsuQbswbmSWj/image.png)

(Source: https://studio.glassnode.com/metrics?a=BTC&category=Exchanges&m=fees.ExchangesRelative&mAvg=7)

As you can see we are up around 10% currently, meaning that almost 10% of all miner fees are being spent on transactions sending bitcoin to exchanges.

If that sounds somewhat high, that's because it is!

It's more than double where were at the beginning of the year and it's the highest we have seen since late 2017.

However, that's not the part I want you to focus on...

# We've seen this setup before?

Look back in January of 2016, right when bitcoin was beginning its previous bull market rally.

As you can see on the above chart we saw a large spike in this metric as well right around that time.

It wasn't quite as high as we are seeing now, but the overall trend was the same, that metric more than doubled from where it just a few months prior.

Given the other factors indicating we might be at the beginning of a bull market rally, this looks like it could also be indicating we are starting our next one as well.

There is a lot of evidence pointing towards us beginning a roughly year long rally that is expected to begin somewhere in the coming months and this looks like it can be thrown in there as well.

Stay informed my friends.

-Doc