Long-Term SOPR

How to read it

SOPR tells you whether coins being spent are moving at a profit or a loss. Restricted to long-term holders, it becomes a read on the most patient cohort. Above 1, long-term holders are selling into strength. Sustained readings below 1 mean they are capitulating — realising losses on coins they have held for months or years, which is rare and has historically clustered near bottoms.

How it's calculated

For each spent output, divide the price when it moved by the price when it was created. Aggregate across outputs held longer than the long-term-holder threshold, conventionally around 155 days.

What it did in past cycles

The upside of this metric has decayed almost beyond usefulness. At the cycle tops it read 16.1 (2013-12-04), 20.6 (2017-12-16), 2.9 (2021-11-08) and 2.4 (2025-10-06). A threshold set anywhere near the early readings would never fire again.

The downside is the opposite story — it is the most stable signal in this collection. Long-term holders realising losses is rare, and every time it has happened in size the market was near a bottom: 0.50 (2015-01-14), 0.42 (2018-12-15), 0.44 (2022-11-09). The June 2026 low read 0.62, in the same territory.

The asymmetry makes sense behaviourally. There is no upper bound on how much profit a patient holder can take, so the peak reading depends entirely on what they paid; but selling at a loss after holding for a year is a decision people only make under real pressure, and pressure looks similar in every cycle.

What it doesn't tell you

Every wallet-to-wallet transfer registers as a 'spend', so ordinary custody changes appear as economic activity. The 155-day threshold is a convention, not a behavioural fact, and lost coins that eventually move can distort the ratio sharply.

The collapse in the peak readings is mostly arithmetic, not behaviour. A long-term holder in 2013 was sitting on a hundredfold gain because they had bought at single-digit dollars; the same 155-day holder in 2025 bought within the same order of magnitude as they sold. The ratio shrank because the underlying returns did.

Reading it with other metrics

Pair it with long-term-holder supply, which answers the question SOPR cannot: whether the cohort is shrinking. SOPR below 1 tells you they are spending at a loss; LTH supply tells you how much they are spending.

Realized price gives the level behind the ratio — the actual dollar cost basis of each cohort — and its STH-below-LTH crossovers have marked the same four periods.

For an unrelated read on the same 'who is under pressure' question, the Puell Multiple covers miners, the other cohort that sells because it has to.