Are Bitcoin Holders Taking Profit? SOPR & Realized Profit Explained

 

On-chain realized profit reached roughly $1.03 billion in a single day on October 8, the second-highest daily figure of 2026 and only narrowly below the year's $1.04 billion peak. According to DailyCoin, citing Santiment data, that burst of selling landed after bitcoin pushed to about $87,000, and the price promptly slid back toward $81,000 for a weekly loss of 5%, alongside roughly $520 million in long liquidations and more than $702 million in US spot bitcoin ETF outflows. Fortune's price record for October 13 puts BTC at $83,408.20, up about 7.95% on the month, down about 27.64% year over year, and still far below the all-time high of $126,198.07 set on October 6, 2025.

 

A stalling price alongside heavy realized gains is precisely the setup that makes the question of who is selling worth measuring rather than guessing. On-chain data can answer it, because every bitcoin that moves carries two prices: the one attached to it when it last moved, and the one attached to it now. Divide the second by the first and you get SOPR. Subtract them and multiply by the amount, and you get realized profit or realized loss. The first describes the character of the selling, the second describes its scale, and both describe what has already happened rather than what sits unrealized on paper.

 

 

 

One is the dividing line. Per Glassnode's metric guide, SOPR divides the USD value of spent outputs at the time of spending by their USD value at creation, so readings above 1 mean coins moved that day were sold at an average profit, and readings below 1 mean they were sold at an average loss.

 

155 days splits the holder base in two. The same guide specifies that STH-SOPR covers only spent outputs younger than 155 days while LTH-SOPR covers those older, and the two series describe very different behavior.

 

Realized profit and loss are the dollar version of the same measurement. Glassnode's definition of net realized profit and loss gives the algebra: net realized profit and loss equals realized profit minus realized loss, and equals one minus the inverse of SOPR, multiplied by USD transfer volume.

 

SOPR tracks behavior while MVRV tracks valuation. The MVRV ratio is market cap divided by realized cap and measures unrealized profit across the whole supply, whereas SOPR measures whether the coins that actually moved were in profit.

 

2026 supplied both extremes. Long-term holders realized roughly $2.4 billion of losses inside 48 hours in early June with LTH-SOPR below 1, and from mid-August the aggregate reading held above 1 for three consecutive weeks, the longest profit run of the year.

 

Ratio and magnitude must be read together. SOPR tells you the average margin on coins that sold, realized profit tells you what that converts to in dollars, and using either alone makes small panics look like mass exits or vice versa.

 

 

 

The $1.03 billion of realized profit logged by Santiment is not a bearish verdict, and the firm explicitly noted the data does not guarantee a major reversal. Its value lies in confirming something narrower: the push from around $81,000 toward $87,000 in October met real supply, and that supply came from holders sitting on gains rather than from forced sellers. Price then retreated, which says the bid did not absorb it.

 

The flow picture that week pointed the same way, with more than $702 million leaving US spot bitcoin ETFs while on-chain realization expanded. For the method behind tracking that channel over time, see our bitcoin ETF flow tracker.

 

 

Stepping back, the current price sits roughly 34% below the record high and about 27.64% below where it traded a year ago, yet about 7.95% above where it stood a month earlier. What makes that position awkward is that holders with different cost bases are in opposite situations: coins bought during the fourth quarter of 2025 remain underwater, while coins accumulated near the mid-2026 lows carry substantial gains. Price alone cannot tell you which group is selling. Separating who moved coins, and whether they moved them at a gain or a loss, is exactly the job SOPR and realized profit and loss were built for. For the wider cycle framework, see our guide to the bitcoin market cycle and the historical distribution of bull market drawdowns.

 

 

 

Every unspent output on the bitcoin ledger records the block time at which it was created, and therefore a dollar price at that moment. When that output is spent, it acquires a second price. Glassnode sums the spending-time dollar value of all outputs spent in a period as the numerator, sums their creation-time dollar value as the denominator, and divides.

 

The reading is accordingly direct. Above 1, coins moved in the period were sold at an average profit. Below 1, they were sold at an average loss, a condition that typically accompanies panic or capitulation. At 1, the average seller breaks even. The metric was devised by Renato Shirakashi, and Glassnode's launch note of June 24, 2019 added a behavioral observation that still holds: in bull markets SOPR tends to dip below 1 and recover quickly, because holders who expect higher prices see little point selling at a loss, while in bear markets it tends to poke above 1 and fade quickly, because sellers fearing further declines treat a breakeven exit as a good outcome. The line at 1 is therefore not only an accounting boundary but frequently a behavioral one.

 

 

Raw SOPR counts every spent output, including the change, consolidation and internal reshuffling transactions that have nothing to do with a trading decision. Glassnode's documentation notes that adjusted SOPR excludes outputs with a lifespan under one hour in order to give a clearer view of genuine buying and selling. For daily analysis, aSOPR is usually the cleaner series, particularly on days when exchanges reorganize wallets at scale.

 

 

 

Glassnode defines STH-SOPR as covering only spent outputs younger than 155 days and LTH-SOPR as covering those older. CryptoQuant's definition of the short-term cohort is more specific still, counting outputs alive for more than one hour and less than 155 days, with the same reading convention around 1.

 

The threshold is not arbitrary. It corresponds to the holding period beyond which behavior changes measurably, with older coins statistically far more likely to be held than traded. Keeping the two curves apart matters because they say different things: short-term realization reflects trading sentiment and leverage conditions, while long-term realization is closer to structural supply release.

 

 

2026 happens to supply both ends of the range. In early June, analysis from Coinspeaker republished by Yahoo Finance reported that long-term holders realized roughly $2.4 billion in aggregate losses over the 48 hours ending June 5, with LTH-SOPR below 1, meaning coins held longer than 155 days were being sold underwater. The piece compared the shape to lows in January 2015, December 2018 and November 2022. Price then bottomed at $58,035 on June 25, the weakest level since September 2024. Long-term holders capitulating has historically clustered near cycle lows rather than cycle tops.

 

The other end is the repair that followed. COINOTAG, citing CryptoQuant data, reported SOPR at 1.002 in early September and noted the metric had held at or above 1 since August 19, a three-week stretch described as the longest profit run of 2026. By October, ChainCatcher relayed charts posted by the analyst Darkfost showing long-term holder SOPR back at a weekly average of 1.25 and a monthly average of 1.16, both above the annual average of 1.10, implying an average realized gain of roughly 10% for that cohort over the past year. Those figures come from an individual analyst rather than an official data-provider release, though the direction matches the broader expansion in realized profit.

 

It bears repeating that a sustained reading above 1 is not bearish by itself. Profit realization is a normal feature of rising markets. The combination worth watching is expanding realization while price fails to make new highs.

 

 

 

Glassnode's definitions here are precise. Realized profit is the total dollar gain on coins that moved on-chain, measured against each coin's price at its previous movement; realized loss is the mirror image; and net realized profit and loss is the difference between them. The documentation also gives the algebraic bridge: net realized profit and loss equals one minus the inverse of SOPR, multiplied by USD transfer volume.

 

That identity explains the division of labor. SOPR is dimensionless and answers only how large the average margin was. Net realized profit and loss multiplies that margin by volume and answers what the realization is worth in dollars. A SOPR of 1.05 on a quiet weekend and the same reading during a high-volume advance imply very different pressure on the market.

 

 

Per Glassnode, positive net realized profit and loss means profits are being taken, and if price is rising at the same time, incoming capital is absorbing that supply, while rising peaks alongside fading demand can mark a local top. Negative values mean losses are being realized, and deep troughs are associated with capitulation that has often preceded upside reversion. Values near zero mean coins are changing hands close to their cost basis, which in a bull correction can indicate restored confidence and in a bear market can indicate overhead supply clearing at breakeven.

 

Place October 8 inside that frame: SOPR above 1 says sellers were in profit, $1.03 billion says the realization ranked second for the year, and the retreat from $87,000 to $81,000 says the bid did not fully absorb it. All three point the same way, and no single one of them would have been sufficient.

 

On-chain data describes what has already happened, while the market keeps moving. Open the BTC spot market and test the on-chain signal against live order flow

 

 

MVRV is market cap divided by realized cap, where realized cap aggregates the cost basis of the entire circulating supply. Glassnode's guide explains that readings above 1 and rising mean unrealized profits are expanding relative to cost basis, strengthening the incentive to sell, with readings above 3.5 historically marking late-stage bull markets and heavy distribution, while readings below 1 mean much of the supply sits underwater, historically coinciding with capitulation and bear-market accumulation.

 

The two metrics answer different questions. MVRV asks what the market would book if everyone sold today, which makes it a thermometer for latent selling pressure that has not yet materialized. SOPR asks what the coins that did sell actually earned or lost, which makes it a record of behavior. Large unrealized gains do not oblige anyone to sell, and that gap is MVRV's blind spot; SOPR's blind spot is that it only ever sees coins that moved, never the dormant majority.

 

The practical approach chains them together. MVRV sizes the pressure, while SOPR and realized profit and loss show whether and how fast it is being released. For the valuation side in detail, see our work on MVRV and realized price.

 

 

 

The first is treating SOPR as a standalone trade signal. The series oscillates tightly around 1, daily crossings are routine in every regime, and only multi-week deviations or clear divergences from price carry analytical weight.

 

The second is ignoring volume. Because SOPR is a ratio, thin on-chain activity lets a small number of transactions drag the reading to an extreme that represents very little capital, which is why the dollar value of realized profit and loss has to be checked alongside it.

 

The third is equating realized profit with selling pressure. Moving coins between addresses registers as a spend on-chain, but the destination may be custody, a rebalance or an internal consolidation rather than a sale. Confirming actual pressure requires exchange inflows, funding rates and open interest, which we cover in the explainer on funding rates and open interest.

 

 

Trades matched inside an exchange's internal ledger never touch the chain, so a large share of real buying and selling is invisible to SOPR. ETF creations and redemptions run partly through off-chain processes, so that supply and demand is only partially represented. Over-the-counter blocks between institutions and custodial wallet reorganizations add further noise, and excluding sub-hour outputs through aSOPR only cleans up the most superficial layer of it.

 

There is also a structural subtlety that is easy to miss. The cost basis SOPR uses is the price at a coin's last movement, not the price its owner actually paid. Coins shuffled between wallets have that basis repeatedly reset, which can push short-horizon readings away from the true profit and loss of the underlying position.

 

 

Track the relationship between SOPR and 1 on a weekly rather than daily basis and watch whether deviations persist. Put realized profit and realized loss side by side to read both the net direction and the location of extremes. Keep STH-SOPR and LTH-SOPR separate to judge whether realization is coming from trading capital or from structural holders. Then cross-check against MVRV, ETF flows and price structure. Any one of these alone invites a wrong conclusion, while the combination produces an evidence chain that can be explained.

 

 

For James Mitchell, SOPR earns its place among on-chain metrics because it converts an unfalsifiable psychological question into an accounting one. Sentiment cannot be measured, but whether a coin that moved was in profit when it moved has a definite answer. The $1.03 billion of realized profit on October 8, followed by the retreat from $87,000 to $81,000, is a complete causal record rather than a narrative assembled after the fact.

 

Two misreadings look most likely. The first is treating a sustained reading above 1 as a topping signal. Profit realization is what a healthy advance is made of, and the dangerous configuration is realization expanding in dollar terms while price fails to clear its prior high, which is ratio and magnitude rising together against a flat tape. The second is reading June's sub-1 LTH-SOPR as deteriorating trend. Long-term holders selling at a loss has historically clustered near cycle lows far more often than near tops, and roughly $2.4 billion of realized losses landing shortly before the June 25 low of $58,035 makes the sequencing hard to ignore.

 

Three variables deserve tracking from here. The first is the series of peaks in daily realized profit: if subsequent peaks rise while price cannot clear the previous high, absorption is weakening. The second is whether long-term holder SOPR holds above its annual average, where the 1.10 level implies a modest average realized gain of about 10%; a rapid climb to much higher multiples has historically belonged to late-cycle distribution. The third is the consistency between on-chain realization and ETF flows. In that October week both pointed the same way, with on-chain realization expanding while more than $702 million left the ETFs. A future combination of heavy realization alongside persistent ETF inflows would mean something quite different, namely coins rotating from older holders into new allocation capital.

 

The cross-asset lesson is that bitcoin is one of the few assets where the cost basis distribution and the actual realization behavior are directly observable. Equity investors infer the same thing indirectly from volume, margin balances and filings, and bond investors from turnover and spreads, while the chain simply records the basis of every coin that moves. The price of that transparency is definitional complexity, since exchange ledgers, ETF plumbing and custodial reorganizations all dilute the signal. The correct use is therefore not as a standalone timing tool but as corroborating evidence for a view formed elsewhere. For anyone accumulating on a schedule, the value lies in understanding where volatility comes from rather than in predicting the next candle, which is what the DCA calculator and profit calculator are built for.

 

 

 

SOPR, the spent output profit ratio, divides the summed USD value of all outputs spent in a period, measured at the moment of spending, by the summed USD value of those same outputs at the moment they were created. A reading above 1 means the coins that moved were sold at an average profit, below 1 means they were sold at an average loss, and 1 means the average seller broke even. The metric was devised by Renato Shirakashi and launched by Glassnode in June 2019, with data running back to January 2013.

 

 

No. Profit realization is a normal component of any advance, and SOPR routinely spends long stretches above 1 during uptrends. The configuration that warrants caution is the combination of rising daily peaks in realized profit with a price that cannot make a new high, which indicates weakening absorption of supply. Daily crossings of the 1 line happen constantly in every regime, so only multi-week deviations or clear divergence from price carry analytical weight.

 

 

The difference is holding period. STH-SOPR counts only spent outputs younger than 155 days and describes short-term holder behavior, while LTH-SOPR counts those older than 155 days and describes long-term holder behavior. The former moves with trading sentiment and leverage conditions, the latter with structural supply release. CryptoQuant's short-term definition additionally excludes outputs alive for less than one hour in order to filter internal transfer noise.

 

 

MVRV is market cap divided by realized cap and measures unrealized profit across the whole supply, so it sizes the latent selling pressure. SOPR measures whether the coins that actually moved were in profit, so it shows whether that pressure is being released. Large paper gains do not oblige anyone to sell, which is MVRV's blind spot, while SOPR never sees the dormant majority of supply. In practice, read MVRV first for pressure and SOPR second for the pace of release.

 

 

Realized profit is the total dollar gain on coins that moved on-chain, measured against each coin's price at its previous movement, and realized loss is the equivalent total for coins that moved below that price. Net realized profit and loss is the difference. It ties directly to SOPR, since it equals one minus the inverse of SOPR multiplied by USD transfer volume. SOPR therefore supplies the relative margin while realized profit and loss supplies the absolute dollar figure, and the two belong together.

 

 

Recent data shows realization expanding. Daily realized profit reached about $1.03 billion on October 8, the second-highest reading of 2026, while price slipped from roughly $87,000 toward $81,000. Analyst-compiled figures also put long-term holder SOPR at a weekly average of 1.25, above the 1.10 annual average. Sellers are therefore in profit on aggregate, but these readings alone do not establish a trend reversal and need to be read alongside price structure and capital flows.

 

 

The main one is that it only sees on-chain movement. Trades matched inside exchange ledgers never touch the chain, parts of the ETF creation and redemption process run off-chain, and over-the-counter blocks and custodial reorganizations add noise. SOPR also uses the price at a coin's last movement as its cost basis rather than what the holder actually paid, so coins shuffled between wallets have that basis reset repeatedly. It works as corroborating evidence, not as a standalone signal.

 

 

Record the relationship between SOPR and 1 weekly rather than daily, read realized profit and realized loss side by side, keep the short-term and long-term holder series separate, and cross-check against MVRV, ETF flows and price structure. The purpose is understanding where volatility originates and how market structure is shifting, not forecasting short-term prices. For the mechanics of buying and holding, see the guide to buying bitcoin, the BTC purchase walkthrough and the live price page, with current platform activity listed on the BTC events page.

 

 

The information above is provided for general market information and analysis only and does not constitute investment advice, financial advice, legal advice, tax advice or a recommendation to trade. Prices of crypto assets, equities and other related financial assets can fluctuate sharply, and past performance, technical indicators and on-chain data do not guarantee future results. The prices, on-chain readings, research conclusions and third-party analysis cited here reflect publicly available information at the time of publication, and some figures were published by individual analysts rather than confirmed through an official data-provider release, so all values may change at any time and the latest disclosures from the relevant institutions and data platforms should be treated as authoritative. Readers should conduct their own research and make decisions based on their own financial circumstances, investment objectives and risk tolerance, consulting a qualified professional where appropriate. The MEXC Crypto Pulse team accepts no liability for any direct or indirect loss arising from the use of this information.

 

 

James Mitchell specializes in technical analysis, market trends, and trading strategies for both Bitcoin and altcoins. Based in London, he has over 10 years of experience in financial markets. Before joining MEXC Learn, James worked as a senior analyst at a leading European investment firm, where he developed expertise in risk management and quantitative trading. His transition to cryptocurrency markets began in 2017, and he has since become recognized for his data-driven approach. He holds a Master's degree in Financial Economics from the London School of Economics. His analytical approach combines traditional technical analysis with on-chain metrics to provide readers with actionable insights.

 

Areas of Expertise: Technical Analysis, Market Trends and Cycles, Trading Strategies, Bitcoin and Altcoin Analysis, Risk Management.

 

 

 

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