Bitcoin’s spot demand slid back to -170K BTC even as its Puell Multiple posted the highest cycle bottom on record, leaving buyers and miners pointing different directions.
Something isn’t adding up on Bitcoin’s chain right now. The buyers who showed up in early July have mostly gone quiet again, yet the miners who usually crack first under this kind of pressure haven’t.
CryptoQuant’s 30-day Spot Demand metric bounced to roughly -80,000 BTC in early July, a real recovery after months of selling. Then it slid back to near -170,000 BTC within weeks. Analyst ScenarioX flagged the reversal in a CryptoQuant QuickTake, calling the setup “structurally fragile” rather than broken outright.
Source: CryptoQuant QuickTake by ScenarioX, cryptoquant.com
The Rally Has No Real Buyer Behind It
Price barely flinched through the swing. That part of ScenarioX’s note carries the most weight. Short covering in derivatives, not fresh spot buying, has done most of the work keeping Bitcoin’s chart level. Futures desks unwinding bearish bets can push a candle up for a while. They can’t do it forever without spot demand eventually showing up to confirm the move.
Every trader watching this chart already knows how that sentence usually ends.
If spot selling stays muted, the note argues, derivatives-driven momentum could keep grinding higher for a stretch. The catch is what happens after. A rally built on short covering alone, without spot demand underneath it, tends to resolve in a long liquidation event once the market runs out of shorts left to squeeze.
Old Whales Are Cracking Too, Just Not First
The pressure isn’t confined to derivatives positioning. Bitcoin’s oldest whale cohort, wallets that sat untouched through nearly every crash since late 2025, booked $297.3 million in realized losses on July 14. Live Bitcoin News covered how that print ranks as the cohort’s second-worst day of the cycle, trailing only a January stretch that began from a much higher price.
Old money selling at a loss is rarely a great sign for anyone.
Miners tell a stranger story though. The gauge built to catch exactly that kind of miner stress has spent this year sitting well above the level where past cycles actually bottomed.
Puell Multiple’s Bottom Keeps Landing Higher
CryptoQuant contributor thechessONCHAIN tracked Bitcoin’s Puell Multiple, which weighs what miners earn today against their 365-day average, across every cycle back to 2018. This cycle’s low came in at 0.53, the highest cycle bottom on record. Today’s reading sits at 0.84.
Source: CryptoQuant QuickTake by thechessONCHAIN, cryptoquant.com
Each cycle’s floor has landed higher than the one before it. It bottomed at 0.28 in December 2018, then 0.35 in July 2022, then 0.49 in September 2024, and 0.53 this June. The floor keeps rising, cycle after cycle.
The halving isn’t the reason, oddly enough. The Puell Multiple scales both sides of its own ratio, so a shrinking block subsidy cancels itself out of the math. What’s actually changed is how far price falls. Bitcoin dropped 83% in 2018 and 77% in 2022, and recent cycles haven’t come close to that kind of destruction, so miner income never sinks as deep as it used to.
A Bottom Signal Without a Bottom-Sized Move
The honest version of this signal is narrower than the headline suggests. Since 2013, Puell readings below 0.65 produced a median 180-day gain near 55%, roughly double a random entry point. Only 57 to 67% of those episodes actually finished higher though, barely ahead of Bitcoin’s own 63% baseline. July 2022 is the example everyone forgets, the signal fired and still took months to pay off.
thechessONCHAIN’s read is that today’s number marks easing miner pressure, not a generational low. 2024 and 2026 both printed their cycle bottoms with price still elevated, which makes them Puell lows rather than price bottoms. Waiting for the classic sub-0.5 capitulation zone might mean waiting for a level that doesn’t show up this cycle at all.
The Market Hasn’t Picked a Side
None of this happens in a vacuum. U.S. margin debt just hit a record $1.42 trillion, and Live Bitcoin News reported that borrowed money across traditional markets is drawing fresh scrutiny for what it could mean if stocks unwind. Crypto liquidations move faster and reset on shorter cycles, so the risk doesn’t transmit directly. It still sits in the background while Bitcoin’s own signals point in two directions at once.
Spot demand says buyers haven’t shown up. Miners say the floor hasn’t fully given way either. Both things are true right now, and neither one is settled.
This article covers on-chain data and analyst commentary. It is not financial or investment advice.
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