The US supply that fueled the April rally is fading.
Bitcoin Coinbase Premium, the difference between the price on Coinbase (COIN), which primarily serves US customers, and on foreign exchanges, turned negative this week for the first time since early April, CryptoQuant data shows.
The metric was 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 building up ever since.
Coinbase is widely used as an indicator of US dollar-denominated and institutional flows, so a persistent negative reading means US investors are consistently paying less than the rest of the world. Either they are selling more aggressively or they just don’t show up.
Onchain data tells the same story from the other side.
Bitcoin’s 7-day realized loss sum, which tracks the total dollar value of coins moved at a loss across the network, soared to $5.97 billion on April 24, when Bitcoin was trading near $78,000.
Realized loss is recognized only when holders sell coins below the price at which they originally purchased them.
A print near $6 billion at $78,000 means 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 sets of data are indicative that US institutional buyers slowed their bidding through Coinbase just as holders increased selling activity. Bitcoin was recently trading around $76,000.
What traders watch from here is whether the realized loss metric continues to fall as subsea supply progresses. The reading has already declined from its April 24 high to $4.7 billion on April 28, suggesting the pool of sellers is shrinking.
