Bitcoin Smashes Records: $650B in Profit Realized—Topping Last Bull Run Already
Bitcoin bulls are cashing in hard—$650 billion worth of hard. That’s not just a new all-time high; it’s already eclipsing the entire profit-taking frenzy of the last cycle. Talk about a wealth transfer on blockchain steroids.
The Profit Tsunami
No one’s HODLing for nostalgia now. Traders and whales are locking in gains at a pace that’d make Wall Street’s quarterly bonus round look like a bake sale. And with institutional FOMO still climbing? This train’s got room.
Cynical Finance Jab
Meanwhile, traditional finance is still trying to mint its own ‘digital dollars’—bless their analog hearts.
What’s next? If history’s any guide, the real fireworks start when the ‘smart money’ realizes they’re late. Again.
Bitcoin Investors Have Shown Three Massive Profit-Taking Sprees This Cycle
In its latest weekly report, the on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has talked about how the profit-taking trend on the bitcoin network has looked during this bull cycle so far.
The indicator of relevance here is the “Realized Profit,” which measures, as its name already suggests, the total amount of profit that the BTC investors are realizing through their transactions.
The metric refers to on-chain data to determine this. It takes the previous transfer price of each token being sold/transacted as its cost basis. If this last acquisition value for any token is less than the current spot price that the coin’s now being moved at, then the token’s sale corresponds to profit realization.
The Realized Profit sums up the difference between the two prices for all such transactions to find the total situation for the network. An alternate metric known as the Realized Loss tracks the sales of the opposite type.
Now, here is the chart shared by Glassnode in the report that shows the trend in the 30-day moving average (MA) of the indicator for Bitcoin over the current and last cycles:
As is visible in the above graph, the 30-day MA Bitcoin Realized Profit has seen three major spikes in the current bull cycle, suggesting that there have been three significant profit-taking waves from the investors. In total, the holders have realized a whopping $650 billion in profit across the cycle. From the chart, it’s visible that the same number stood at around $550 billion for the previous cycle, $100 billion lower.
It’s also apparent that this number includes the cooldown phase that started after the price top in November 2021 and lasted until the bear market started in full swing in April 2022. Thus, even if the latest cycle has already topped out, the gap in Realized Profit WOULD only widen in the near future, as BTC goes through this late profit-taking phase.
This puts into perspective the scale of gains that the Bitcoin investors have taken so far. That said, while the total Realized Profit has hit a large number, the short-term trend is that of a decline in profitability.
The latest spike in the Realized Profit occurring earlier in the year was significantly smaller in scale than both the selloffs from 2024. Since this profit-taking spree, the indicator has been heading down.
BTC price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is floating around $106,800, up 1% over the last seven days.
