Long-term Bitcoin holders have been selling at a loss for four months

Data show that long-term Bitcoin holders have been selling their coins at a loss for four months now.

SOPR of long-term Bitcoin holders has recently fallen below 1

According to the latest weekly report from Glassnode, long-term BTC holders have been selling at a loss in recent weeks.

The relevant metric here is “Spent Output Profit Ratio”. This indicates whether investors in the Bitcoin market are moving the coin in losses or profits.

If the value of this metric is greater than 1, it means that the average holder is currently profitably moving the coin.

On the other hand, the indicator’s value below the threshold suggests that the market as a whole is seeing some losses at the moment.

The BTC market cohort is the “long-term holder” (LTH) group, which includes all investors who have held their coins for at least 155 days without selling or moving them.

Here is a chart showing Bitcoin SOPR trends over the last few years, specifically for LTH.

The value of the metric seems to have been trending up in recent days | Source: Glassnode's The Week Onchain - Week 37, 2022

As you can see from the graph above, the 7-day moving average for long-term Bitcoin holders SOPR has been below 1 for about four months. This means that these LTHs were aware of losses during this period.

During the 2018-2019 bear market, the indicator stayed in this territory for about 11 months, aside from a few sudden spikes.

These sudden breaks into the green area were caused by the movement of large amounts of old BTC supply (generally holding sizable profits).

Historically, properly dividing a metric into values ​​greater than 1 has returned Bitcoin to bullish momentum.

Recently, LTH SOPR has been steadily rising and is approaching breakeven. It is currently unclear if this indicator will hover above this line, or if it will still remain in the lower territory for a few months, similar to previous bear markets.

BTC price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is priced at around $21.3k, up 8% over the past week. Over the past month, cryptocurrencies have lost 12% in value.

The chart below shows the coin’s price trend over the last 5 days.

Looks like the value of the crypto has plunged down today | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Kanchanara on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Glassnode.com