Bitcoin buyers who entered within the past three months are now close to breakeven, while losses remain much heavier for holders in the 3-to-6-month bracket, according to a CryptoQuant market note published on Aug. 11 by analyst Axel Adler Jr. He said the stress in the market is no longer centered on the newest buyers alone and is shifting up the holder age curve.
Bitcoin traded at $64,048 on the same day, down 1.77% over 24 hours. Intraday, it moved between $63,806 and $65,328. Its 7-day and 30-day changes stood at 0.7% and 0.1%, leaving the asset stuck around the $64,000 area for nearly a month.
NUPL for the newest cohort has recovered to -0.02
NUPL measures unrealized profit or loss for a defined holder age group against that group’s acquisition cost. Adler said the NUPL for the 0-to-3-month cohort improved from -0.13 in June to -0.02, putting that group close to breakeven. The 3-to-6-month cohort was still at -0.14. It had also bounced from its June low, but the recovery was much smaller.
Using the Aug. 11 spot price, the implied cost basis for the 0-to-3-month cohort was about $65,300, only 2% above market. The 3-to-6-month group sat around $72,989, or 12.3% above spot. That gap makes the difference in pressure between the two cohorts hard to miss.
Adler had separately put the short-term holder realized price at $67,523 on Aug. 8, when spot Bitcoin was $64,952, or 3.81% below that level. Since short-term holders span 0 to 155 days, effectively combining the two younger cohorts in the report, the 3.8% gap sits between the two readings and lines up with the split-cohort data.
April buyers are now the more stressed group
The report compared current conditions with a bullish call made on April 22 by Grayscale head of research Zach Pandl. At that time, Bitcoin was near $76,000 and the realized price for 1-to-3-month traders was about $74,000, meaning short-term buyers had just crossed from loss into profit.
Pandl said at the time, 「If Bitcoin prices move higher in the coming days, more recent buyers will move into profit, which usually marks the first stage of a bull market.」
He also argued that the $65,000 to $70,000 range had formed a 「solid bottom.」 From April 22 to Aug. 11, roughly three and a half months passed. Buyers who had just returned to breakeven then now fall into the 3-to-6-month bucket, with an average cost basis of $72,989, almost overlapping with Grayscale’s $74,000 reference point. Several months later, that group is down 12.3%, and the earlier bottom range has already been broken.
The note drew a distinction between the way breakeven is approached now and the way it was approached in April. Back then, price moved back above cost. This time, cost basis moved lower as new buyers entered at lower levels. In other words, the 0-to-3-month cohort now carries a much lower cost base at $65,300. A recovery in NUPL does not mean price itself has recovered.
Realized cap drawdown points to aging supply, not direct realized losses
Adler also examined realized cap drawdown for the 3-to-6-month cohort. That measure worsened from -53% in mid-June to -69.6%, a deterioration of 16.6 percentage points over two months and the weakest reading in the past 90 days. The 0-to-3-month group, by comparison, stayed around -64% for an extended period, leaving a gap of 5.6 percentage points between the two cohorts.
He explicitly said the metric should not be read as realized losses or capital outflows. Holder age bands are fluid. Coins move from the 0-to-3-month segment into the 3-to-6-month segment and later move out again. What the indicator shows is how far the current realized value of a cohort sits below its own peak.
That means -69.6% does not say this group has lost nearly 70% of its principal. It says the capital stock currently sitting in that age bucket is only about 30% of its own peak size. New money has not refilled the segment, while older coins have kept aging out of it.
Macro conditions are adding pressure
The report also placed the on-chain picture against a tougher macro backdrop. The 10-year U.S. Treasury yield stood at 4.73% on Aug. 11, up 2 basis points from the prior trading day. Market pricing for a 25-basis-point rate hike in September rose to 51%, from 44% a day earlier, driven by inflation concerns tied to higher oil prices.
Cleveland Fed President Beth Hammack said bringing inflation back to the 2% target may require multiple rate hikes. At the same time, labor data weakened. Nonfarm payrolls for July unexpectedly fell by 23,000, while the May and June figures were revised down by a combined 103,000. The combination of softer employment and hotter inflation leaves the Federal Reserve facing pressure on both sides and narrows room for rate-cut expectations. The Fear and Greed Index printed 29 on Aug. 11, in fear territory, after readings of 31 and 30 on the prior two days.
Two on-chain lines now stand out more than simple support levels
Technically, Bitcoin has been consolidating between $63,800 and $65,400 for about a month. The first level overhead is the 0-to-3-month cohort’s average cost basis at $65,300. A sustained move above that line would mean the latest wave of buyers has turned positive on paper. Above that sits the aggregate short-term holder realized price at $67,523.
On the downside, the local low of $63,806.27 set in the early hours of Aug. 11 is the immediate level to watch. If that breaks, the next line mentioned in the report is the round-number $60,000 area.
Derivatives positioning remains relatively contained
In derivatives, total Bitcoin open interest across the market stood at about $46.75 billion. Binance BTCUSDT perpetual open interest was 106,322 BTC, with a funding rate of 0.002007% on an eight-hour settlement basis. The report described that as near neutral, with a slight long-side payment bias, and noted there was no deeply negative funding typically seen before a short squeeze.
During the early Aug. 11 sell-off, liquidations reached $100 million over four hours. Over 24 hours, total market liquidations came to $186 million across 74,959 traders. The report said that scale looked more like a flush of floating leverage than a system-wide deleveraging event.
What Adler is watching next
Adler highlighted two cleaner signals than simple chart support. First, if the 3-to-6-month cohort’s NUPL climbs back above zero, that would suggest the current pressure has genuinely eased. Second, if the 0-to-3-month cohort’s NUPL falls back below -0.10, unrealized stress would be spreading back toward the newest buyers.
On the realized cap drawdown side, the article said continued deterioration in the 3-to-6-month cohort would also be a risk signal to watch.