Blockware Intelligence Newsletter: Week 213
Bitcoin on-chain analysis, mining analysis, macro analysis; overview of 5/25/26 - 5/29/26
The Most Reliable Level in Bitcoin’s History Is Doing It Again
Three times in the past four years, a single on-chain metric has rejected Bitcoin. And every single time, it was followed by roughly two months of consolidation before the next major leg higher.
It just happened again in May 2026.
The level is called the Short-Term Holder Realized Price. It is the average cost basis of every Bitcoin buyer from the past 155 days. This is not a technical indicator or a moving average. It is pulled directly from Bitcoin’s transparent, publicly verifiable blockchain, across millions of transactions and wallet addresses.
The reason it works as resistance comes down to basic human psychology. Short-term holders are momentum and sentiment driven. They buy on upswings, they sell on downswings, and when the price finally recovers back to their break-even level, the overwhelming majority of them take their money off the table. This behavior shows up on the blockchain every single time.
Here is how it has played out historically:
November 2022 — Bitcoin was rejected at the STH realized price, dropped from $20,000 to around $16,000, and consolidated there for two months. That was the starting point for what became one of the best bull markets in Bitcoin’s history, with BTC going up over 100% in back-to-back years.
August 2024 — Bitcoin looked like it was going to break through but failed. Two months of choppy consolidation followed before BTC ran from roughly $50,000 to $100,000 in just three months.
February 2025 — Same dynamic. Failed breakout, two months of consolidation, then all-time highs shortly after.
May 2026 — The breakout failed again. If this pattern continues, and it has held every single time over the past four years, we are probably looking at continued consolidation until around mid-July before the next leg up begins.
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Short Term Holder Spent Output Profit Ratio (SOPR)
This metric looks at the price at which short term holders are moving BTC relative to their cost basis.
SOPR < 1 (red) = moving coins at a loss
SOPR > 1 (green) = moving coins at a gain
We’re seeing this capitulation-at-cost-basis through this metric — short-term holders are now selling coins at a loss in the aggregate. This indicates that some supply overhead is at play; which will potentially cause BTC to consolidate for another 2 months.
While short-term holders are selling at their cost basis and keeping a lid on price, long-term holders have quietly accumulated a record high of nearly 15 million Bitcoin. Long-term holders are defined as anyone who has held their Bitcoin for at least five months. These are not momentum chasers. They have sat through drawdowns, through capitulation events, through months of sideways price action, and they have not sold.
That divergence between the two groups tells you a lot about what comes after the consolidation.
Short term: Sideways to down
Medium term: Breakout into next bull run
Coin Days Destroyed: Old Coins Are Not Moving
Coin Days Destroyed is one of the more nuanced on-chain metrics available. Unlike simple transaction volume, CDD weights each Bitcoin by how long it was held before being moved. One Bitcoin held for 1,000 days and then transferred destroys 1,000 coin days. One Bitcoin bought yesterday and moved destroys just one.
This is useful because it tells us not just how much Bitcoin is moving, but who is moving it.
Big spikes in CDD can happen for two reasons. The first is a large capitulatory event where a lot of Bitcoin, including older coins, gets moved all at once. That is actually what happened earlier in this cycle when Bitcoin dropped from around $120,000 down to $80,000 and ultimately to $60,000. A brief, sharp spike in CDD told us that a meaningful amount of supply, some of it held for a while, was being moved rapidly. That was capitulation.
The second way CDD spikes is during a prolonged bull market top, like 2017, where you see a slow and gradual rise over many months rather than one sharp jerk higher. That kind of rise is driven by older coins selling into strength over time.
Right now, CDD is at a multi-year low. It has not been this low since early 2024.
This tells us two things. Overall activity on the blockchain is low. And the coins that are being moved are not old coins. Long-term holders are not selling at current prices. The activity we are seeing is almost entirely coming from that short-term, emotionally-driven cohort. Once they finish cycling out, the only capitulation left will largely be gone.
Risk Assets Hit New All-Time Highs
This week SPY, QQQ, NDQ, and IWM all printed new all-time highs. That is a broad-based move, not a narrow one. Large caps, small caps, growth, and the overall market moving together to record levels is about as risk-on an environment as you can get.
For Bitcoin, this backdrop matters. When capital is flowing freely into risk assets across the board, Bitcoin tends to benefit. The short-term holder consolidation we outlined in the on-chain section is playing out against one of the more constructive equity backdrops in recent memory. That is not a bad setup for when the consolidation resolves.
Rates pulled back this week, which offered some short-term relief across markets. Bond volatility, as measured by the MOVE index, has been trending down and is currently sitting around 69 — well off the elevated levels seen throughout 2022, 2023, and into 2025.
The pullback in rates is worth noting, but it is probably not the start of a new trend lower. The more likely interpretation is that this is a relief rally within a broader uptrend. Rates have been grinding higher on a structural basis for years now, and nothing about the current fiscal picture gives a good reason to believe that changes in a meaningful way anytime soon. The U.S. continues to run large deficits, issuance is not slowing down, and foreign demand for Treasuries remains a question mark.
For Bitcoin, the implications cut both ways depending on your time horizon. Rates rising in the near term is a headwind. Higher rates pull capital toward yield-bearing instruments and away from non-yielding assets. That is a short-term risk-off dynamic.
Over the medium and long term though, persistently high rates on a mountain of government debt is precisely the kind of fiscal pressure that historically forces central banks toward yield curve control or outright QE. The U.S. cannot afford to let rates run indefinitely. At some point the interest expense on the debt becomes the dominant budget line item and the Fed has to step in.
