Bitcoin Supply in Profit Near 50%: 655% Rally History

Bitcoin supply in profit is flashing a signal that history says you probably shouldn't ignore. The metric — which tracks what percentage of all BTC in circulation is currently sitting at a gain relative to its last on-chain move — stood at 60.6% as of late March 2026, still within the band that has repeatedly preceded some of Bitcoin's most explosive multi-year runs. Less than two months ago, on February 5, it briefly touched 50.8%, the lowest reading since January 2, 2023. That's the number doing all the talking right now.

What the 50% Threshold Has Meant in Past Cycles

Two prior instances stand out. In January 2023, Bitcoin was changing hands around $16,682 — nobody was thrilled about it — and the total supply in profit had fallen to roughly 51%. What followed was a 655% surge that took BTC all the way to $126,000 by 2025. Go back further to March 2020: the metric slipped below 50% while Bitcoin traded near $6,500, a number that seemed horrifying at the time. The subsequent move to $69,000 in 2021 more than validated the signal.

The pattern isn't coincidental. When nearly half the circulating supply is sitting at breakeven or a loss, the incentive to panic-sell drops sharply. Unrealized losses weigh on portfolios but don't necessarily translate into realized ones — especially when long-term holders have already committed to their position. That compression of paper losses across the network tends to precede periods where the balance tips back toward buyers.

What the 50–60% profitability zone does is carve out the territory where a large share of the market is near its cost basis. It doesn't tell you exactly when the bottom prints. What it does say — if you weight the historical record — is that buying in this zone has historically offered a far more favorable risk-to-reward ratio than buying into euphoria at 85%+ profitability.

Why This Cycle Feels Structurally Different

Here's the part that deserves more scrutiny. In 2015, 2018, and 2022, prior bear market bottoms were confirmed when the long-term holder net unrealized profit/loss (LTH-NUPL) turned negative — meaning long-term investors were, in aggregate, holding at a loss. That condition acted as a kind of capitulation clock: when even the HODLers were underwater, the bottom was usually close.

That hasn't happened this cycle. The current LTH-NUPL sits near 0.40, which means long-term holders are still comfortably in profit even as overall supply profitability has compressed toward historical lows. On-chain data tracked by Glassnode shows the divergence is real and growing.

The explanation? Structural market change. Corporate treasuries and spot ETF vehicles now collectively account for roughly 15.8% of Bitcoin's entire circulating supply — that's 3,319,677 BTC held by entities that think in multi-year time horizons and aren't watching the 4-hour chart. They're not panic sellers. They're not reactive to a bad CPI print or a risk-off Tuesday. Their presence in the market acts as a kind of shock absorber, dampening the forced-selling cascades that used to deepen corrections in prior cycles.

So yes, the supply profitability metric is revisiting levels that historically screamed accumulation. But the reason the market hasn't cracked further may partly be because those deep-pocketed holders simply aren't budging.

Does the On-Chain Data Back a Bottom?

What do Bitcoin on-chain metrics say about where the price bottom is?

Short answer: not confirmed. Supportive, but not confirmed. The short-term holder BTC flows to Binance — a reliable proxy for reactive selling pressure — fell to 25,000 BTC on March 25, according to crypto analyst Darkfost. That's a sharp drop from the roughly 100,000 BTC flowing to the exchange during the early February selloff. Fewer coins moving to Binance from recent buyers means the panic-selling impulse has cooled considerably.

Analyst GugaOnChain has pointed to a set of valuation models that help map where deeper market stress historically emerges. The combination of MVRV below 1, NUPL under -0.2, and a Puell Multiple near 0.35 has appeared during periods of significant retail capitulation and historically undervalued BTC conditions. We're not there yet across all three metrics — but they serve as useful goalposts for understanding how much more downside stress the market would need to absorb before those extreme zones get hit.

What we do have is a market where the supply profitability compression is real, long-term holders remain profitable and unshaken, short-term selling pressure has measurably declined, and institutional ownership has meaningfully changed the structural dynamics of potential capitulation. That's not a buy signal. But it's not nothing either.