Is Bitcoin Now Overheating? Key Metrics Reveal Crucial Insights For Investors
2024-11-12

Amid Bitcoin’s pursuit to hit the six figures all-time high (ATH), a CryptoQuant analyst known as aytekin, has shared a comprehensive analysis on tools to assess Bitcoin’s market temperature, focusing on distinguishing useful from potentially misleading metrics.
According to aytekin, investors’ concerns often center around Bitcoin’s ability to reach new peaks and when it might experience a market top. To navigate these questions, he highlighted two charts he pays less attention to for gauging market sentiment: “open interest” and the “supply in profit” metric.
Challenges With BTC Key Metrics
The analyst elaborated that establishing a causal link between price and open interest remains challenging, as historical data indicates that price fluctuations tend to drive changes in open interest levels rather than the reverse.
Furthermore, the analyst reveals that with the growth of futures markets and Bitcoin’s adoption, higher levels of open interest are anticipated in the coming years.
Another metric aytekin views as potentially misleading is the “supply in profit,” which measures overall network profitability. This metric correlates with Bitcoin’s nominal price, often leading to extreme spikes above 95% in profitability during ATH periods.
However, aytekin suggests that reaching new highs would be problematic if extreme profitability consistently triggered major sell-offs. Instead, he recommends considering how long these high-profitability levels persist, noting that historically, such conditions have lasted up to a year within broader market cycles.
Credible Metric Suggests Overheating Bitcoin?
In contrast, the analyst emphasized two metrics he finds valuable for tracking Bitcoin’s market sentiment: the funding rate and the Spent Output Profit Ratio (SOPR). The funding rate, which tracks the cost paid between long and short positions in futures markets, serves as a tool to identify “overzealous” market optimism.
Aytekin believes monitoring this metric offers better insights than open interest for assessing market conditions. As of now, he notes that funding rates are not signaling extreme market behavior.
The analyst reveals that the SOPR metric clarifies profitability trends, particularly when smoothed using a 30-day moving average.
Aytekin highlights that profitability alone is not inherently risky unless it coincides with supply movements within the market. The CryptoQuant analyst reveals that current SOPR levels indicate a market that, while showing signs of profitability, does not exhibit symptoms of overheating.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin has been trading for $81,838, up by 2.4% in the past day. This trading price marks a 0.6% decline from the asset’s ATH of $82,379 created earlier today.
When writing, the asset’s market capitalization sits above $1.6 billion with a 24-hour trading volume of $90.6 billion.
Featured image created with DALL-E, Chart from TradingView