More than 80% of short-term Bitcoin holders are currently losing money on their BTC positions, according to a popular on-chain analyst.
The pseudonymous on-chain sleuth known as Checkmate tells his 97,000 followers on the social media platform X that the short-term holder (STH) metric looks similar to charts in 2018, 2019 and mid-2021, all of which signaled investor panic and incoming bearish trends.
The analyst defines STH as entities that have held their coins for less than 155 days.
But the analyst says this time could be different because while a huge number of short-term holders are in the red, their cost basis is not way below the current value of BTC.
“Just because a coin is held below its cost basis, it doesn’t tell us how bad it is. Being under by -1% is very different psychologically to being under by -20%. Despite 80% of STH coins being in loss, the magnitude of unrealized loss is just 4% of the market cap.”
The trend also appears limited to short-term holders.
Overall, 81% of Bitcoin investors are making money at the current BTC price, according to the crypto analytics firm IntoTheBlock.
Bitcoin is trading at $60,438 at time of writing. The top-ranked crypto asset by market cap is up more than 3% in the past 24 hours.
Checkmate also estimates that the average price to mine Bitcoin is currently around $57,200, indicating that miners are still making profits at current levels.
“I can only imagine miners are white-knuckling the current environment, and barely profitable. For HODLers, this is largely irrelevant (and expected). For miners and shareholders… hope for a rally.”
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