ChartQuant

Every coin bought between spot and the prior all-time high is underwater. Their average buy price forms a wall of overhead supply above the market. It appears in every bear and vanishes once price reclaims the high. The chart marks that wall at each cycle bottom. Past lows sat 120-170% below it. So far, this one bottomed just 47% under, with the same ~10.7M coins trapped. Same wall of supply, much closer to price, much less in loss.

@cryptovizart @_checkonchain @_nym21_ @OnChainMind @_Checkmatey_ Capital Ulcer (CU) CU = √[ Mean( Supply in Loss % )² over 365d ] ​Price Ulcer (PU) PU = √[ Mean( Price Drawdown % )² over 365d ] ​(Note: The drawdown for PU is calculated from the recent peak price).

To make sense of where we are, you first have to separate surface pain from deep pain. The Price Ulcer measures surface pain, how far price has dropped from its high and how long it has been staying down. The Capital Ulcer measures deep, financial pain, the actual percentage of coin supply sitting underwater over time. ​Notice what happened on the way up to the peak. Before the top even formed, the Capital Ulcer jumped on top of the Price Ulcer for the first time in Bitcoin's history. That was an early signal that a massive chunk of supply was bought high up on the curve, piling in relatively close to the top and creating a heavy stack of high-cost-basis coins. ​Also notice that this inversion never went away. Capital pain has stayed higher than price pain all the way into 2026. In simple terms, the actual financial burden on holders is outstripping the headline price drop. ​In every past bear market, a true bottom was carved out when the gap between these two lines blew wide open, with Price Ulcer soaring far above Capital Ulcer. That widening gap was the unmistakable fingerprint of a capitulation flush, forced liquidations and panic driving price down far past where supply was actually underwater. ​Today, The two lines are climbing together in near-perfect parallel. This tells us we aren't seeing a forced liquidation cascade. It is an orderly repricing. Price fell just enough to drown recent buyers, with almost every drop matched 1-to-1 by capital going underwater, but without the panic overshoot of previous cycles. ​So what does all this mean for the near future? ​With stickier ETF capital and less system-wide leverage than in 2018 or 2022, Bitcoin may be establishing a new way to bottom, absorbing a high-cost overhang through time and spot demand rather than needing a violent price crash to exhaust sellers. ​Because an unfinished bottom can temporarily look like this too, we shouldn't force a rigid prediction. If the Price Ulcer finally breaks out above the Capital Ulcer and the gap opens, classic late capitulation has arrived and lower lows are next. But if the Price Ulcer stalls beneath it and both lines roll over together, demand has absorbed the supply without a flush, and the new structural bottom holds.

@cryptojack Wow... A metric that structurally trends up and to the right over time hit another ATH

BREAKING: $BTC long term holder supply hits new ATH.

@_checkonchain Price Pain and Time Pain definitely paint a compelling picture for a bottom. But when you bring Capital Pain (NUPL) into the mix, it shows we are actually nowhere near a true capitulation.

The Bitcoin price has been edging higher in recent weeks, after recovering the 200-week moving average around $63k. The market did experience a weekly close below the 200WMA towards the end of of June, but has since held above it for four consecutive weeks. Attention now turns to the next key level: the Short-Term Holder cost basis at $68k, where the average recent BTC buyer returns to a state of profit. In our latest newsletter piece, @_Checkmatey_ examines why this transition has historically been an important milestone in bear market recoveries, and what the latest onchain data suggests about investor behaviour → newsletter.checkonchain.com/p/edging-higher

Institutional money is not waiting to buy the Bitcoin bottom. The data shows that a significant portion of the capital that recently left the market wasn't even investing in Bitcoin directly. They were playing a different game: buy the ETF, short the futures, and pocket the difference. On the day the ETFs launched, that "basis trade" paid 12% annualized, and through the first quarter, it ran even higher, touching 36%! But as the chart shows, the trade stopped paying and the yield collapsed. Today it stands at 3.9%, which barely beats the 3.6% return you get from holding plain cash. When the spread vanished, mechanical buying switched to automatic unwinding (represented by the dark "money out" dots). If the futures basis crawls back up or the trend reverses, the big bids will return automatically. They don't hunt the bottom or trigger the recovery, they chase the trend

@BCBacker And if it breaks the 300-week moving average, we will redraw with the 400-week moving average and hope that it holds!

5. This bear market for the total market cap is the same depths as 2022, including the actual FTX collapse, landing on the 300-week moving average, which held it during all past bears, including FTX and Covid-19.

The herd is corralled into the September/October BTC bottom theory of 1-year post peak. Everyone loves timing predictions. Q4 2025 was the same. Here's what you are betting against. 1. On-chain already hit FTX crash & post bear market levels. Saylor forced to sell.

@QuintenFrancois This chart counts how many coins are underwater. It doesn't show how far, or for how long, and that's what makes a bottom.

Look at this chart and convince me the cycle bottom is not extremely close

Everyone's arguing over whether we've hit the bottom. The more useful question almost no one's asking: What shape will this cycle's bottom be? The answer lies in how the top was formed. This time there was no blow-off spike, just a slow grind higher, as ETF and treasury flows bought their way up. Rounded top suggests a rounded bottom. So instead of a sharp V we may have a long, grinding bottom without seeing deep drawdown that defined past cycles. At the same time, there's a tail risk that instead of a slow bleed, the institutional holders flip to forced sellers and print a fast, deep flush. The one outcome that looks least likely of all is ripping straight up from here and leaving a shallow, quick bottom behind us.

Who's actually been selling in the past 90 days? Sort long-term-holder spending by on-chain cost basis, and the sellers bunch at the Oct-Nov 2025 top. Of the 370,207 BTC sold by the largest groups, 83% was sold at a loss. Top buyers are capitulating, but the flush looks unfinished

The Puell Multiple divides the dollar value of each day's newly mined bitcoin by its own 365-day average. High means miners are earning well above trend and new supply is richly priced. Low means issuance is cheap and sellers are running low on fuel. Today it reads 0.73, every prior cycle low first drove it under 0.5, often into the 0.3-0.4 pocket. The tank is draining, not empty. By this gauge, still not the bottom.

@_nym21_ @cryptovizart Appreciate it! Will do 🤝

@cryptovizart @NegCap gotcha, very cool ! well @NegCap I'm here if you have any questions or need anything

Long-Term Holders now hold about 84% of circulating supply. That is a record. But owning the supply is not the same as having your conviction tested. The sharper question is how much pain these holders have actually absorbed. Read the pain through unrealized loss as a share of their own market cap, i.e. their paper loss, divided by what those coins are worth today. It reads 19.7% right now. At the 2018 low it hit 82.8%. At the 2022 low, 76.1%. Past bottoms dragged this cohort deep underwater before price turned. This pullback has barely wet their feet.