Bitcoin long term owners have been selling at a loss for 4 months now

Data shows that Bitcoin’s long-term owners have been selling their coins at a loss for a period of four months now.

Bitcoin long-term holder SOPR has stayed below 1 lately

According to the latest weekly report from Glassnode, BTC’s long-term holders have continued to sell at a loss in recent weeks.

The relevant indicator here is the “Spent Output Profit Ratio”, which tells us whether investors in the Bitcoin market are moving their coins at a loss or a profit.

When the value of this metric is greater than one, it means that the average owner is moving coins at a profit right now.

On the other hand, the value of the indicator less than the threshold suggests that the overall market is realizing some loss at the moment.

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

Now, here is a chart showing the trend of Bitcoin SOPR over the last few years, specifically for the LTHs:

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 in the graph above, the 7-day moving average of Bitcoin long-term holding SOPR has been below a value of 1 for about four months now. This means that these LTHs have realized losses in this period.

Back in the bear market of 2018-19, the indicator stayed in this region for about eleven months, barring a few sudden spikes.

These sudden bursts into the green region were caused by the movement of a large amount of older BTC supply (which generally has a significant amount of profit).

Historically, a proper break of the metric to values ​​greater than one has led to a transition back to bullish momentum for Bitcoin.

Recently, LTH SOPR has climbed steadily upwards, and it is now approaching the break-even mark. For now, it is unclear whether the indicator will continue and cross this line, or whether it will remain in the region below for several months yet, similar to the previous bear market.

BTC price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price is hovering around $21.3k, up 8% in the last week. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 12% in value.

The chart below shows the trend in the price of the coin over the last five 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