Bitcoin might not have hit bottom yet. One of its cleanest on-chain metrics suggests the bear market needs new macro lows before this cycle is over.
The metric in question is Net Unrealized Profit/Loss — NUPL for short. It measures how much of the BTC supply is sitting at a profit or loss relative to its last move. Right now, the score sits at 0.158, a level we haven’t seen since early 2023.
CryptoQuant contributor TheChessOnChain smoothed NUPL into 30 and 100-day exponential moving averages. The 100-day EMA is slowly trending toward cycle bottom levels below zero. Every time that’s happened before — late 2011, January 2015, December 2018, November 2022 — Bitcoin was carving its cycle bottom.
BTC’s currently hovering just above $60,000. The NUPL 100-day EMA sits at 0.215. There’s plenty of room to drop to match previous bear-market patterns.
That said, CryptoQuant notes NUPL has put in higher lows over Bitcoin’s history. A trip below zero may not be essential. Two paths: either the 100-day EMA crosses zero like it did at every prior bottom, or this becomes the first cycle to bottom without it.
No timeline was given for when the next bottom could hit. The zero line is the level to watch in the coming weeks.
Other onchain signals are echoing 2022 patterns. Bollinger Bands creator John Bollinger recently flagged a potential W-shaped reversal for end of the bear market. Fellow CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler Jr. noted supply data presents mixed signals — supply in loss could still be two months off levels that traditionally mark the end of Bitcoin bear markets.
Bottom line: the data says we’re not out of this yet. Whether that means a trip below $58K is anyone’s guess, but history suggests it’s on the table.
