On-chain data shows that early Bitcoin miners participated in a lot of profit-taking in the asset’s recent price range.
Bitcoin miners reaped big profits between $62,000 and $70,000
As CryptoQuant Founder and CEO Ki Young Ju pointed out in a new job on X, the “first” BTC miners have made huge profits this year. Early miners here refer to Bitcoin validators who entered during the cryptocurrency’s early adoption phase.
Miners usually sell what they mine in order to pay their operating costs, but some of them may choose to HODL instead. Some early miners haven’t moved their block rewards in ages.
These miners may also be HODLing, but a more likely explanation for their inactivity could be that their wallets were simply lost because they were forgotten or their keys were misplaced.
Still, it looks like some of these old miners have woken up again, as they’ve been making some moves recently.
Below is a chart that shows the trend of “profit made» for these first miners over the last decade:
The value of the metric seems to have registered some spikes in recent months | Source: @ki_young_ju on X
Here, realized profit is an indicator that measures the total amount of profit (in USD) that early cryptocurrency miners reap from their transactions.
The metric calculates this by subtracting the price at which coins were last moved by these former entities, from the current spot price at which these investors are moving them again.
As the chart shows, the indicator’s value has seen some very significant spikes this year, suggesting that early miners have decided to book some of their gains.
These high readings of the indicator came while the price was trading between $62,000 and $70,000 and corresponded to a total profit-taking spree of a whopping $550 million.
From the chart, it is clear that this type of trend is not unusual for a bull market, as previous phases of the cryptocurrency also saw early miners breaking their silence to make large profits.
Another cohort of veterans has also just participated in a lot of profit taking: long-term incumbent whales. THE long-term holders (LTH) refer to investors who hold their coins for more than 155 days, while the whales are generally defined as holders owning at least 1,000 BTC.
Thus, LTH whales would be the biggest HODLers in the market. Like the table below shared by the founder of CryptoQuant in another job As shown, the profits made by these investors have recently increased sharply.
Looks like the value of the metric has been quite high recently | Source: @ki_young_ju on X
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at around $65,000, down around 4% over the past week.
The price of the asset appears to have been going down recently | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured image of Dall-E, CryptoQuant.com, chart from TradingView.com
