Bitcoin Sell-Side Risk Ratio Plummets to October 2023 Lows: Bullish Signal or Calm Before the Storm?
Bitcoin's sell-side risk ratio just hit its lowest level since October 2023—a metric that often signals a drying up of immediate selling pressure.
The Mechanics of Market Stress
Think of the sell-side risk ratio as the market's panic gauge. It measures the potential selling volume from short-term holders against the asset's overall market depth. When it falls, it suggests fewer coins are sitting in 'weak hands'—wallets likely to sell on a whim or a dip. The current plunge to October 2023 levels indicates a significant consolidation phase. Long-term holders are digging in, and speculative churn is fading. That's classic accumulation behavior, the kind that often precedes a sustained move when fresh capital enters.
Interpreting the Signal
Historically, suppressed sell-side risk creates a structural setup for volatility. With fewer coins readily available to hit the market, any surge in buy-side demand can lead to sharper price appreciation—liquidity gets thin fast. It doesn't guarantee an upward rocket, but it removes a major headwind. The market's foundation gets firmer, less prone to cascading sell-offs from nervous newcomers. Of course, in crypto, 'stable' is a relative term—this just means the powder keg has less loose dynamite lying around.
The Other Side of the Coin
Low selling pressure can also reflect complacency. If everyone's holding, who's left to buy? The ratio doesn't measure incoming demand, only the absence of immediate supply threats. It's a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for a bull run. The market needs a catalyst—a regulatory green light, an institutional on-ramp, a macro shift—to turn this sturdy floor into a launchpad. Otherwise, we're just watching paint dry on a very expensive, very digital wall.
The Bottom Line
This metric shift points to a maturing market phase. The weak hands have been shaken out, replaced by conviction holders. It's a bullish technical setup, arguably one of the cleanest since late 2023. But remember, in traditional finance, they call this 'low volatility'—in crypto, we call it 'the deep breath before the next ridiculous tweet.'
Bitcoin Sell-Side Risk Ratio Has Fallen To Multi-Year Lows
In a new post on X, Glassnode analyst Chris Beamish has talked about the latest trend in the Bitcoin Sell-Side Risk Ratio, an on-chain indicator that keeps track of the ratio between the sum of all profits and losses realized on the network and the cryptocurrency’s Realized Cap.
The Realized Cap here refers to a capitalization model that calculates BTC’s total value by assuming that the value of each coin in circulation is equal to the price at which it was last transacted on the blockchain.
The last transfer price of any token is likely to represent its cost basis, so the Realized Cap measures the sum of the cost bases of the total BTC supply. In other words, it represents the total amount of capital that the investors have put into the cryptocurrency.
As such, the Sell-Side Risk Ratio tells us about how the amount of profit and loss that Bitcoin investors are realizing compares against the total capital stored in the asset.
Now, here is the chart for the indicator shared by Beamish that shows how its value has changed over the last few years:
As displayed in the above graph, the Bitcoin Sell-Side Risk Ratio shot up to a notable value with the price crash in November. This suggests that investors took a large amount of profit and loss alongside the volatility.
Since this high, the indicator’s value has seen a steep drop and has returned to the lowest level since October 2023. The analyst has noted that this points to “subdued conviction behind distribution at current price levels.”
Typically, market volatility tends to be low when these conditions form, so it only remains to be seen how the price of the cryptocurrency will develop in the NEAR future.
In some other news, demand from the Bitcoin retail investors has been missing recently, as CryptoQuant author IT Tech has pointed out in an X post. The indicator cited by IT Tech is the 30-day change in the Retail Investor Demand, measuring the percentage change in the volume associated with the small hands (transactions valued at less than $10,000).
As is visible in the chart, the 30-day change in the Bitcoin Retail Investor Demand has been declining inside the negative zone recently, implying that the activity of the retail entities has been going down. The indicator’s trend hasn’t changed even after the recent recovery surge.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $94,300, up more than 3% over the last 24 hours.
