CryptoQuant Sees Bitcoin (BTC) Bull Market Forming as Dormant Share Eases to 26.59%

Dormant Coins Step Back

On-chain transaction data is pointing toward the earliest stage of a fresh bull market in Bitcoin (BTC), with long-term holders retreating from selling; the share of market cap valued at the price each coin last moved onchain, a measure known as realized cap, that belongs to coins dormant for 18 months or longer has stopped climbing and begun to ease. That cohort's share reached 26.98% on September 16, the highest since mid-November 2024, and has since drifted down to 26.59%, holding broadly steady since mid-September; Bitcoin price, meanwhile, holds near $80,413, essentially flat over the past 24 hours. CryptoQuant, which sorts the network's unspent transaction outputs, the accounting entries that record each coin's last movement, into age bands weighted by their contribution to realized cap, set out the historical pattern in a research note: whenever the proportion of coins held for more than 18 months rises across the network and then turns lower, a strong rally has followed. Reduced spending by these investors reflects a choice to keep Bitcoin (BTC) exposure and build profitability over a longer horizon; the cohort's contribution had been on a broad uptrend since November 2025, with profit-taking rising as the market fell further from the all-time high of $126,200. The peak in the same share, printed in mid-November 2024, came before the last sustained advance, and a declining share means old coins are no longer flowing to market in size. The decline from the September peak is small, 0.39 of a percentage point, but the direction matters more than the size here, because the fall itself is what the historical pattern keys on. The firm treats the present reversal as modest, writing that the market has moved into a bullish cycle but that the early stages have barely begun, a point at which there is room, as it puts it, on both the upside and the length of the rally.

Cost Bases Hold the Floor

Among long-term holders, only the cohort holding coins for between 18 months and two years sits in aggregate loss; the on-chain record puts that group's cost basis, the average price at which its coins were acquired, at $93,193, the line below which its aggregate position flips underwater, and the market has traded beneath it since the 2025 advance to $126,200. Every older cohort remains in profit. That makes 2026 the first bear market in which price has stayed above the cost basis of the two-to-three-year cohort, a line the realized-price tables keep visible cycle by cycle. A report released last week by Galaxy Digital reaches a compatible conclusion from the supply side, describing the current drawdown as the shallowest bear market on record, with a maximum decline of 53% from the all-time high; no earlier cycle, including the 2018 and 2022 phases, drew down less. The same report tracks coins held in custody for five years or more, the supply it identifies as the glut that stopped price at $126,200; those coins moved at 67,000 Bitcoin (BTC) a month in 2024 and 47,000 in 2025, totaling 1.11 million BTC distributed since October 2024, the largest distribution of old coins in any cycle, most of it absorbed by spot ETFs and by BTC digital asset treasury companies. In 2026 the five-year-plus cohort has supplied an average of 34,000 BTC a month, half the 2024 pace. At the 2024 rate, old coins were released into a market that nonetheless topped out at $126,200; the slower 2026 release works the other way, thinning overhead supply while ETF creations and treasury balances keep absorbing whatever does move. Read against the 18-month-plus cohort's retreat from selling, the deceleration turns two separate data sets into one account of the same tightening supply.

The structure of the tape, read through COINOTAG's own composite scoring, fits that continuity: the live price sits at $80,413, flat over 24 hours, with our support and resistance levels placing the strongest floor at $78,086, scored 98 out of 100, and the nearest ceiling at $81,602, scored 80 out of 100. Positioning adds little stress either way: 71.0% of tracked accounts are long against 29.0% short, and perp funding runs at 0.0071%. The trend label, for its part, is still a downtrend; what the session did not change is the on-chain condition underneath it, with the 18-month-plus share of realized cap holding its reduced range since mid-September while price holds above the strongest support band.