Bitcoin Bloodbath: Holders Realized $213 Billion in Total Losses Over the Past Year

Data shows that Bitcoin holders have locked in losses totaling $213 billion over the past year.

Bitcoin investors have realized $213 billion in losses in this bear market

According to data from the data analysis company in the chain Glass nodethe losses realized have meant that 47% of the gains in the bull market are now gone.

When an investor holds any number of coins and the price of Bitcoin falls below the value at which the holder purchased the coins, the coins accumulate some unrealized loss.

If the investor sells or moves these coins at this lower price, the loss borne is “realized”.

The “realized loss” is an indicator that measures the total amount of such losses locked in by holders in the entire BTC network.

Naturally, the opposite calculation is called “realized profit”, and tells us about the profit reaped by the investors.

Now, here’s a chart showing how the annual totals of both of these Bitcoin indicators have changed over the past few years:

There seems to have been a large amount of losses locked in during the past year | Source: Glassnode on Twitter

As you can see in the graph above, the 2020-21 Bitcoin bull market had a peak annual profit realization of around $455 billion.

The bear market for 2021-22 has so far seen a realized loss peak of $213 billion, which is the value of the metric right now. This means that over the past 365 days, BTC holders have locked in this extremely high amount of losses.

Glassnode notes that these losses mean that there has been an approx. 47% relative capital loss of the gains observed during the bull market.

The chart also highlights these values ​​for the previous cycle. It appears that the highest annual total of realized profits seen during the 2017-18 bull market was around $117 billion.

And the loss realization peak observed in the corresponding bear market in 2018-19 measured around $56 billion. Interestingly, peak profits and losses during both the current cycle and the previous one have almost the same ratios.

This means that the capital loss seen between the bull and the bear in the current cycle is now at the same level as when the previous cycle bottomed out.

BTC price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin’s price is hovering around $16.9k, down 1% in the last week. Over the past month, the crypto has lost 18% in value.

The chart below shows the BTC price trend over the past five days.

Looks like the value of the crypto continues to move sideways around $16.9k | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Hans-Jurgen Mager on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Glassnode.com