Bitcoin (BTC) Short-Term Holder SOPR Slips to 0.99, Below Breakeven

Underwater Short-Term Buyers Cap Rallies

The latest test came on Sunday, November 8, when the Bitcoin (BTC) price pushed to $76,200 in futures trading and fell back to $75,650 within the same session, and on-chain data published on Sunday explains why every rebound keeps failing. The short-term holder spending profit ratio, known as STH-SOPR, stood near 0.99, just under the breakeven line of 1.0. The metric compares the price at which coins move on-chain with the price their previous owners paid, so a reading below 1 means the average transferred coin changed hands at a loss. With recent buyers underwater, each bounce hands them a chance to exit near their cost basis, so rallies meet a wall of loss-cutting supply before they can build. Underwater supply of this kind tends to cap moves early: sellers need only a modest bounce, not a new high, to cut their losses, so advances die well below where bulls want them. XWIN Japan, an on-chain analyst, named this overhang the main factor limiting Bitcoin's recovery: until short-term holders are back in profit, strength attracts sellers instead of fresh demand. The selling pressure also shows up in order-flow data. Cumulative volume delta, a running count of market sell orders minus market buy orders, has recorded minus 105,300 Bitcoin (BTC) since October 14, meaning aggressive selling has outweighed aggressive buying for nearly a month. The slide had already stretched into a five-week losing streak before the weekend bounce. The composition matters as much as the size: the coins moving at a loss belong to recent entrants rather than whale-scale early holders, which is why the market has avoided broad capitulation so far. XWIN Japan attached a caveat to his own reading: coins can shift between wallets without ever reaching an exchange, so on-chain transfers do not automatically equal realized selling, and transaction flows need checking before the SOPR dip becomes a sell signal.

For an asset whose supply is fixed by proof-of-work code, demand decides direction, and the level map shows how thin the demand cushion has become. Bitcoin (BTC) trades near $74,400, down 2.1% over 24 hours and little changed since the Sunday report, about $430 above the strongest support on COINOTAG's composite scoring. That level, $73,959, rates 100 out of 100; overhead, the $76,331 shelf that rejected the weekend rally scores 72. Momentum agrees with the downtrend, with the relative strength index near 34.7. Positioning is the bigger risk: funding runs at just 0.0032% while 76.3% of accounts lean long, a 3.22-to-1 skew that left longs bearing most of a recent $1.05 billion liquidation wipeout. Sentiment sits at 29 on the Fear and Greed Index, deep in fear, and the full Bitcoin technical analysis picture updates daily.

Exchange Stablecoin Reserves Down 34%

The deeper problem is that the money waiting to buy has thinned out. Balances of Ethereum-based ERC-20 stablecoins held across exchanges fell from roughly $75 billion in April to $49.7 billion in early November, a 34% decline over about seven months. On-chain data shows the drop ran gradual through September and steepened from late October, exactly the stretch in which Bitcoin (BTC) lost its footing. Those balances are one of the standard proxies for the dry powder available to buy dips, so their shrinkage leaves less capacity to absorb selling across the wider Bitcoin market if price slips further. Institutional demand faded in step. US spot ETF flows turned negative last week: on Friday, November 6, the funds recorded $411.9 million in net outflows, of which BlackRock's IBIT alone accounted for $403 million. For the November 2 to 6 trading week, net outflows across the complex reached roughly $1.28 billion, so the drain was a sustained pattern rather than a single day of redemptions. The shortfall did not start there: our earlier coverage flagged weak spot demand after Bitcoin failed to hold $80,000 for five days. Not every holder is underwater. The market-wide MVRV ratio, which averages unrealized profit across the whole supply, still reads 1.40, so earlier buyers who HODL through drawdowns remain in profit even as recent entrants sit at a loss. XWIN Japan cautioned that the two cohorts behave differently at bounces: the underwater group sells to shrink its losses, while profitable long-held coins rarely move at these prices. His recovery checklist is concrete: short-term holder SOPR back above 1.0, stablecoin reserves on exchanges stabilizing, and cumulative volume delta plus ETF flows turning positive. “The important thing is not a simple price rebound, but whether real buyers are actually returning to the market,” he wrote. The condition he wants reversed has deep roots: exchange stablecoin reserves have now declined for roughly seven months, and the pace of the drop has quickened over the past two weeks.