Bitcoin short-term holders are locking in profits near $88,000 even as the Nasdaq reaches record highs and shares of Strategy and BitMine claw back steep losses, according to a report from Live Bitcoin News.

Short-Term Holders Send Coins to Exchanges

Coins are moving again. On-chain data from CryptoQuant shows that short-term Bitcoin holders transferred a sizable amount of BTC to exchanges this week as the price pushed back toward $88,000. The cohort — conventionally defined as wallets that acquired their coins within the past 155 days — endured weeks of losses and has swung back into profit, a shift that has historically acted as a sell-pressure signal rather than a sign of panic selling. The transfer destination matters because coins parked on trading platforms can be sold at a moment's notice, which is why analysts treat exchange-flow data as one of the most direct gauges of sell-side supply.

The movement lines up with how Bitcoin has traded since the spring drawdown. The price fell hard, buyers stepped in, and the last several sessions have been a slow grind back toward resistance somewhere in the mid-$80,000 range. None of that is unusual for a market climbing out of a sharp correction: investors who bought near the bottom are simply taking some chips off the table.

The open question is whether fresh demand can absorb that supply the way it has on prior legs higher — a dynamic that has already surfaced this week in Solana and several other large-cap assets. Exchange balance trends over the coming sessions will provide a running scoreboard. (Source: TradingView, BTCUSD daily chart)

Records Elsewhere Complicate the Bearish Case

Bitcoin's pullback from its highs has coincided with strength nearly everywhere else. The Nasdaq 100 crossed 30,700 this week for the first time ever, putting the index on pace for one of its strongest four-year runs since the late 1990s, according to the figures cited in the report. The comparison matters because Bitcoin and the Nasdaq now share much of the same institutional audience, a convergence that accelerated after U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs won approval in January 2024 and gave traditional funds a regulated vehicle for holding the asset. President Donald Trump also told reporters on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly that talks with Iran were ongoing and that a settlement might be reached soon, easing one geopolitical overhang weighing on risk assets.

Bitcoin falling while stocks print records is not a new phenomenon. The same divergence appeared during earlier corrections, and each time the gap closed rather than widened further. Stablecoin infrastructure also kept expanding through the noise, with Binance locking in a new stake in Circle, the issuer of the USDC stablecoin, the same week.

The Stocks Everyone Left for Dead

Two names from the Bitcoin ETF and institutional corner tell this story more clearly than Bitcoin's own chart. Strategy's STRC preferred shares, nicknamed "Stretch" by traders, spent months as exhibit A for the bear case, falling from the mid-$90s to roughly $71 earlier this year as the wider crypto treasury trade came apart. Strategy — the company formerly known as MicroStrategy and the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin — sold STRC as one of the preferred instruments funding its Bitcoin accumulation, making the ticker a direct read on the treasury trade itself. The shares have since clawed back to $99.06, erasing almost the entire drawdown. (Source: TradingView, STRC — Strategy Inc. Variable Rate Series A Perpetual Stretch Preferred Stock — daily chart)

BitMine Immersion Technologies tells a similar story. The Ethereum treasury company, chaired by Tom Lee and holding one of the largest corporate Ethereum treasuries, has seen its BMNR shares climb to roughly $28.76, up about 127% from a recent low over roughly the past 100 trading days. That recovery took place even though Lee took plenty of heat for his public calls on the stock, made back when Ethereum traded well above where it sits now. (Source: TradingView, BMNR — BitMine Immersion Technologies — daily chart)

Risk Has Not Gone Away

Both moves point, in the report's telling, to the same lesson: investors who sat through the drawdown in these crypto proxies have come out ahead of those who sold into the panic and waited for confirmation that never really arrived. That is not a guarantee the next leg will play out the same way, but writing off a name after a crash has been the wrong trade more often than not this cycle.

Risk has not gone anywhere. Short-term holder selling near $88,000 could easily flare back up if Bitcoin fails to clear resistance. Still, the report notes, a market in which the Nasdaq keeps printing records, Iran talks are cooling tensions rather than raising them, and last quarter's most heavily sold-off stocks are recovering fastest does not look like something built purely on fear.

Source: Live Bitcoin News