Bitcoin SOPR

The Spent Output Profit Ratio was introduced by Renato Shirakashi in April 2019. It looks only at coins that actually moved that day: for every spent UTXO, compute price-when-spent ÷ price-when-created, then aggregate volume-weighted. SOPR above 1 means the day's on-chain turnover was, on average, sold in profit; below 1, sold at a loss. Where MVRV and NUPL measure paper gains, SOPR measures gains actually banked.

Shirakashi's key observation: in bull markets, dips of SOPR toward 1 get rejected — holders refuse to sell at a loss, sell pressure dries up, price finds support. In bear markets the mirror image holds: rallies of SOPR up to 1 get sold — trapped buyers exit at break-even, turning 1 into resistance. How SOPR interacts with the 1-line (support versus resistance) is itself a regime signal for bull versus bear structure.

Sustained readings well above 1 mean active profit-taking — normal mid-bull, but a distribution warning if price stalls beneath it. Deep readings below 1 mean panic loss-realization; capitulation bottoms (March 2020 being the textbook case) printed deep SOPR flushes followed by V-shaped recovery. Daily values are noisy; a 7-day average is the common smoothing.

SOPR assumes moved = sold, but self-transfers and exchange wallet reshuffles create spend records without any sale. Aggregated it works as a proxy, but check single-day spikes against known wallet migrations first. Variants: aSOPR excludes outputs held under one hour (transactional churn); LTH-SOPR and STH-SOPR split by the 155-day threshold to track veterans' and newcomers' realized P&L separately.

Beyond cycle positioning, gauge short-term sentiment with market-wide liquidations and BTC liquidation data.