The US bid that drove April’s rally is fading.
Bitcoins Coinbase Premium, the difference between the price of Coinbase (COIN) – which caters primarily to US customers – and on offshore exchanges, turned negative this week for the first time since early April, CryptoQuant data shows.
The metric ran consistently positive from April 8 to April 22, the same window that took bitcoin from $66,000 to a local high near $78,000. The premium peaked around April 22 and has been rolling since then.
Coinbase is widely used as a proxy for US institutional and dollar-denominated flows, so a sustained negative reading means US investors are consistently paying less than the rest of the world. They either sell more aggressively or simply don’t show up.
Onchain data tells the same story from the other side.
The Bitcoin Realized Loss 7-day Sum, which tracks the total dollar value of coins moved at a loss across the network, rose to $5.97 billion on April 24 as bitcoin traded near $78,000.
Realized loss is recognized only when holders sell coins below the price at which they originally purchased them.
A push near $6 billion to $78,000 means the sellers were buyers at higher prices. CryptoQuant analyst Axel Adler Jr. said in a report that the cohort likely entered between $80,000 and $95,000 in late 2025 and early 2026, using the April bounce as an exit rather than a re-entry point.
The two data sets are signs that US institutional buyers are slowing their bids through the Coinbase court as holders increased selling activity. Bitcoin recently traded around $76,000.
What traders are watching from here is whether the Realized Loss metrics continue to decline as the underwater supply works its way through. The reading has already fallen from its peak on April 24 to $4.7 billion on April 28, suggesting that the group of sellers is thinning.
