The champagne bottles have stopped popping in Bitcoin boardrooms. For the first time in over a year, cryptocurrency holders are witnessing losses in their portfolios, with losses reaching $6.1 billion since December.
Blockchain analytics firm CryptoQuant has come out with research showing Bitcoin investors have booked net losses of roughly 69,000 coins since late December 23, 2025. This represents a significant reversal from the profit-taking trend that has been in place since October 2023. According to the firm, what’s happening now looks a lot like what happened before the 2022 bear market hit.
“This marks a regime change from profit-taking to loss realization over the past 30 days,” CryptoQuant researchers said Thursday. They have observed that realized profit momentum dropped steadily through 2024 and into 2025.
Numbers Tell a Grim Story
Annual net realized profits have reduced from 4.4 million Bitcoins back in October to 2.5 million today. That’s the weakest showing since March 2024. Julio Moreno, who runs research at CryptoQuant, explained how they crunch these numbers: they look at transfer prices against previous transaction values, pulling data straight from the blockchain and exchange prices.
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Bitcoin’s sitting at about $89,760 these days—that’s almost 30% off its October high of $126,080. The slide has erased plenty of gains, leaving the coin down 16% year-over-year. Bitcoin’s only closed out a year in negative territory four times in its 17-year run.
History Might Be Repeating Itself
CryptoQuant’s team sees troubling similarities to 2021-2022. Back then, realized profits topped out in January 2021, then kept making lower highs before flipping negative ahead of the 2022 bear market. What’s happening with net realized losses right now? The current situation is similar to that of March 2022, when bears had already gained control.
That said, plenty of analysts aren’t buying the doom and gloom. They’re pointing to factors like lower interest rates down the road, bigger institutions getting involved, and countries adopting Bitcoin. These factors have the potential to reverse the current trend and initiate a new upward trend.
