STH / LTH Realized Price

The Realized Price chart plots three lines on a shared logarithmic price axis: spot Bitcoin, the average cost basis of short-term holders (coins last moved within 155 days), and the average cost basis of long-term holders (coins older than 155 days). The chart’s readable feature is the band between the two cost bases — a shaded olive zone whose width and orientation describe what each cohort paid.

Today’s reading is $78,199.03 spot against an STH cost basis of $78,769.13 and an LTH cost basis of $47,912.52. That places spot in the Between cost bases regime. The STH/LTH spread is +64.4%; the spot price refreshes a few times a day in the browser, while the cost-basis lines are recomputed nightly against every UTXO that moved in the previous 24 hours.

Both cost-basis lines are slices of realized capitalisation — the framework Nic Carter and Antoine Le Calvez introduced at the Baltic Honeybadger 2018 conference. Realized cap values each unspent transaction output (UTXO) at the price it last moved on-chain rather than at today’s market price; per coin, that yields realized price.

The cohort split traces to Rafael Schultze-Kraft and Kilian Heeg’s 2020 paper Quantifying Short-Term and Long-Term Holder Bitcoin Supply, which identified 155 days as the inflection point at which a coin’s probability of being spent flattens out. Their methodology applies a logistic transition (midpoint 155 days, 10-day width) rather than a hard cutoff so the cohort boundary breathes smoothly through time.

The two series compute as:

STH realized price = Σ (last_spent_price·value) over UTXOs aged < 155d ÷ STH supply
LTH realized price = Σ (last_spent_price·value) over UTXOs aged ≥ 155d ÷ LTH supply

Both series are taken from the upstream as already-aggregated cohort lines; per-UTXO last-spent prices are not reconstructed from the raw blockchain. The data sources page documents the upstream feed and the methodology page records the smoothing convention and known divergences.

Three regimes carry distinct historical meaning. Above both cost bases is the bull-regime default — every cohort in aggregate profit, with the spread between spot and LTH a coarse measure of cycle maturity. Between the cost bases means recent buyers are underwater while long-term holders remain in profit, the transitional shape typical of late corrections and early bear markets. Below both means even long-term holders are at a paper loss — a regime that has bracketed the 2015, 2018, and 2022 cycle bottoms on the daily-close record. The 2020 Covid flush is the only modern bottom that did not reach this regime, by a margin of five percent.

Reading every canonical cycle anchor against today’s cohort series surfaces the regime pattern. The 2015 cycle low printed deepest at −42.9% below LTH; the 2018 trough at −27.5%; the 2022 post-FTX trough at −25.2%. The 2020 Covid sell-off is the sole exception on this dataset — the closest daily close to an LTH breach (17 March 2020) bottomed +5.3% above LTH cost basis and then recovered. Three of four bottoms confirm the regime; the fourth illustrates that even a cleanly defined signal misses occasionally.

The single most informative read on this chart is not either line by itself — it is the spread between them. STH cost basis tracks recent flow; LTH cost basis tracks the long memory of the network. The spread’s sign and magnitude maps onto cycle phase with the kind of regularity the rest of the on-chain stack rarely manages.

Spread strongly positive (STH well above LTH). The bull regime. New capital is paying premiums over the older cohort’s cost basis. Every prior cycle peak has fired with the spread maximally extended.

Spread compressing toward zero. The late-bull or early-bear shape. New capital has slowed; long-term holders’ average cost is catching up to recent buyers’.

Spread negative (STH below LTH). The bear-market signature. Long-term holders’ average cost basis exceeds recent buyers’ because LTHs include coins picked up near the prior cycle top. Every Bitcoin bear since 2015 has ended only after the spread closed and crossed back, with the cross dates landing in early 2015, late 2018, and mid-2022.

Today’s spread is +64.4%. That places the network in the fully extended bull phase under this lens — cross-check against STH/LTH SOPR, which carries the same cohort logic on spent outputs rather than aggregate cost basis.

Across 5,733 daily closes in the cohort series, spot has closed below LTH cost basis on 674 of them — a residency of 11.8%. The figure is the bear-market anatomy of the asset in one number: long-term holders are, on average, in unrealised profit on the great majority of all trading days. The residency in below-LTH territory is concentrated almost entirely in three windows — mid-2014 to mid-2015, late 2018, and mid-to-late 2022 — with only a single brief modern occupation outside those bear cycles.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. The LTH cost basis is the cleanest reference for “is the long-term holder cohort still net up?” A spot print below LTH is a strong (not certain) generational-bottom marker. Treat below-LTH days as a tactical accumulation accelerator, not a forecast.

For a cycle-timing trader. The STH/LTH spread is a slow indicator; it moves on the order of weeks, not days. It will not catch sharp local tops or flushes, but it brackets cycle phase well. Pair with STH/LTH SOPR and MVRV for faster-moving cohort signals.

For a researcher. The numbers on this page are reproducible from the cohort realized-price series plus the daily-close history. The 155-day cohort smoothing and the upstream feed shape are documented on the methodology page.

The 2020 Covid bottom did not breach LTH. The closest daily close on btc oak’s series was 17 March 2020, with spot at $5,032.50 against an LTH realized price of $4,777.30 — a margin of +5.34%. A mechanical “below LTH = bottom” rule would have missed the entry. The signal is high-conviction when it fires; the absence of the signal does not preclude a cycle-trough print.

Lost coins inflate LTH supply at near-zero cost basis. Chainalysis research has estimated 2.78 to 3.79 million BTC permanently lost; Sergio Demian Lerner’s Patoshi research identifies roughly 1.1 million Satoshi-era coins that have never moved since 2010 (recap on Yahoo Finance). Both categories sit in the LTH bucket with near-zero realized prices, biasing LTH cost basis down and LTH supply up; in particularly stressed bottoms this can make the LTH line look more “held” than the active float justifies.

Cohort migration noise. The 155-day boundary is statistical, not economic. Coins purchased near a cycle peak age past the boundary into LTH continuously, lifting LTH realized price even when no holder has bought. In strong bull runs this mechanical drift accounts for a meaningful fraction of LTH cost-basis growth — the indicator is not capturing fresh LTH demand, it is capturing the calendar.

Single-entity reset events. When a custodian consolidates UTXOs, every affected coin is repriced to the consolidation-day value even though no economic ownership has changed. The aggregate effect is small relative to the float, but in pathological cases (the Coinbase cold-storage migration in December 2018, for one well-documented example, see Felipe at Paradigma Capital’s deep-dive) cohort cost bases can briefly mis-state the network’s true position.

Canonical questions from Google’s “People also ask” block for bitcoin realized price, answered against the data on this page.