Analyst: Bitcoin is now in the closest buy zone it has been in for nearly three years.

Golden Finance reports that on April 1, CryptoQuant data shows Bitcoin’s realized price (the average cost basis benchmark weighted by the last trade of all coins in the network) is $54,286, while the spot price is $68,774—about a $14,500 gap, meaning the realized price is roughly 21% lower than the spot price.
Looking back to the 2022 bear market, the signal for the actual bottom was that the spot price fell below the realized price. From June to October 2022, Bitcoin’s spot price stayed below the overall cost basis benchmark, and when the spot price was about 15% lower than the realized price, that decline almost exactly matched the cycle low of about $15,500.
Similar breaches also occurred as early as the COVID crash in early 2020. These periods are true accumulation zones, because the network average is in a loss state throughout. Historically, when the market as a whole is underwater, buying is one of Bitcoin’s most reliable entry signals.
The current situation is not the same. With the spot price 21% above the realized price, the average holder is still in profit, which provides a significant cushion. If Bitcoin is to fall from its current level back to the realized price, it would need to drop to about $54,000, which implies another 20% decline.
Notably, the gap between the spot price and realized price is narrowing at a very fast pace. At the end of 2024, when Bitcoin was trading above $119,000, the premium was around 120%, and within about 15 months it has already compressed to 21%—one of the fastest periods to approach the realized price line besides a full-blown crash. CryptoQuant analyst Oinonen pointed out on Monday that Bitcoin has entered the so-called “accumulation zone,” and compared it to the bottom at the end of 2022. But this assessment is premature.
CryptoQuant’s own chart shows that its definition of the 2022 accumulation zone is when the spot price trades at or below the realized price. And the boxed area they drew on the current price trend shows that the spot price is still far above the metric that defines that range.