Realized Price (STH vs LTH)

Cost basis of short- vs long-term holders — key support/resistance in bull and bear markets.

Data to 2026-09-14. On-chain metrics are fetched on a rotation, so this can trail the build by a few days.

How to read it

Realized price is the aggregate cost basis of a cohort — the average price at which their coins last moved. Short-term holders' realized price often acts as support in bull markets and resistance in bear markets, because it is the level at which recent buyers break even.

How it's calculated

The realized value of each cohort's supply divided by the number of coins they hold, split by the conventional 155-day holding threshold.

What it did in past cycles

The signal worth knowing is the crossover — the rare stretches when short-term holders' cost basis falls below long-term holders'. It has happened four times, and each one sits in a bear-market bottom:

2012-02-01 → 2012-04-20 — 80 days
2015-02-18 → 2015-11-02 — 258 days, spanning the $176 low
2019-01-31 → 2019-05-01 — 91 days, after the December 2018 bottom
2022-11-09 → 2023-02-25 — 109 days, beginning on the exact day of the $15,758 low

At cycle tops the two diverge enormously instead. On 2025-10-06 short-term holders' realized price stood at $112,300 against $37,650 for long-term holders — recent buyers had paid three times what the patient cohort did. The same gap was 3.2× in 2021 and 13.8× in 2017.

What it doesn't tell you

The cohort boundary is arbitrary, and coins cross it by the passage of time rather than by any decision. As with all realized-value metrics, internal transfers reset cost basis without a trade taking place.

The crossovers below are a consequence of that mechanical boundary as much as of behaviour: coins bought near a top age into the long-term cohort about five months later, dragging its cost basis up whether or not anyone chose anything. Read a crossover as evidence that recent buyers overpaid relative to patient ones, not as an action by either group.

Reading it with other metrics

Long-Term SOPR is the flow to this stock: realized price is what the cohort paid, SOPR is whether what they are spending today is above or below it. Both marked November 2022.

MVRV is the whole-market version of the same cost-basis idea with the cohorts collapsed together, and the 200-week moving average is the price-only floor that has historically sat near these levels at bottoms.