Bitcoin Short-Term Holders Ship 47,300 BTC to Exchanges Deep in the Red

CryptoQuant's short-term holder profit-and-loss chart shows about 47,300 BTC moving to exchanges below the price their owners paid, measured over 24 hours. Only around 1,100 BTC showed up in profit. Combined inflows landed near 48,500 BTC — roughly $3.6 billion at Bitcoin's price of about $74,000.

There's a catch: the chart tracks transfers, not completed sales. Sending coins to an exchange can be the first step toward selling, but deposits also happen for swapping into other tokens, posting collateral or using other services. The data doesn't say how much of that Bitcoin was actually sold. CryptoQuant generally defines short-term holders as investors who've held for less than 155 days — the crowd most exposed when price flips against them.

CryptoQuant contributor Amr Taha flagged two big waves of underwater deposits in a November 11 analysis: 50,790 BTC on November 3 and 46,060 BTC on November 10. Profitable transfers on November 10 sat near 1,700 BTC, he wrote, meaning roughly 27 BTC arrived at a loss for every 1 BTC sent in profit. That's an unusually lopsided flow — coins are coming in below cost, not as cashed-in gains from the earlier rally.

A separate CryptoQuant chart slicing Binance deposits by when each coin last moved on-chain shows 3,290 BTC from coins last moved one day to one week earlier on November 1, then 8,114 BTC from the same category on November 3. Binance also took in 1,925 BTC on November 9 from coins last moved one to three months prior, per Taha. Those numbers reveal which age groups are active, though not when owners originally bought.

The backdrop: Bitcoin has slid from late-September highs above $85,000 into the $73,000-to-$74,000 zone. A buyer who paid $80,000 is sitting on a paper loss of roughly 7.5% at $74,000, and selling there locks it in. The pressure isn't only from recent buyers — Glassnode identified about 4 million BTC held by longer-term investors that was acquired between $85,000 and $118,000, another pocket of supply sitting underwater above current prices.