Bitcoin (BTC) demand in the United States is under pressure as investors react to the failure of the CLARITY Act to advance in the Senate, with onchain data pointing to a sharp divergence between US and offshore exchange activity.

Key points:

• Bitcoin's Coinbase Premium Index fell to -0.079 on Tuesday, its lowest level since Aug. 16.
• US sell-side pressure diverged from other major exchanges as the CLARITY Act failed to advance in the Senate.
• Short-term holders sent 34,000 BTC to exchanges in the last 24 hours, potentially for sale at a — the largest inflow in a month.

Analyst sees "bullish" signal as Coinbase selling diverges from Binance

Senators failed to give the CLARITY Act — the market-structure bill aimed at setting clearer regulatory rules for digital assets in the United States — the necessary 60 votes on Tuesday, leaving only a handful of options for returning the key piece of crypto legislation to the debate stage before 2027.

Bitcoin came under downside pressure following the news, with US demand bearing the brunt of the decision. Data from onchain analytics platform CryptoQuant shows the Coinbase Premium dropping to one-month lows of -0.079 on Tuesday.

The Coinbase Premium, which measures the difference in price between Coinbase's and Binance's BTC/USDT pairs, had briefly turned positive at the start of the week, reaching 0.004, before falling deeper over the course of Monday. It currently sits at its lowest level since Aug. 16, when BTC/USD traded around $63,000, according to CryptoQuant's Coinbase Premium Index.

A negative Coinbase Premium implies a comparative lack of demand from Coinbase traders relative to Binance users. Because Coinbase's order flow is dominated by US-based traders while Binance serves largely offshore markets, the spread between the two is widely watched as a barometer of American demand — which is why the Senate outcome registered so quickly in the metric. The premium has spent much of 2026 in the red, underscoring the exodus of investor capital as Bitcoin fell from its latest all-time high of $126,200 reached in October 2025.

Responding to the data, onchain analyst Willy Woo flagged that the divergence in seller behavior between Coinbase and non-US exchanges intensified around the vote.

Woo produced a chart of cumulative volume delta (CVD) data by exchange, denominated in BTC since Sept. 6. CVD measures the difference between net buyer and seller volume over a single candle, adding each candle's data to the total for a given period. Around Sept. 11, Binance's CVD began to move higher, while Coinbase's continued to fall as sellers there remained firmly in control.

"I see the US selling with the failed Clarity Act (on Coinbase) Meanwhile the more dominant global offshore continues accumulating (on Binance)," Woo wrote in a post on X, describing the scenario as "bullish."

Short-term holders send BTC to exchanges in unrealized loss

CryptoQuant data further showed that the bulk of reactive selling following the CLARITY failure came from newer Bitcoin investors.

Short-term holders (STH) — wallets holding an unspent transaction output (UTXO) for less than six months — sent up to 34,000 BTC to exchanges on a rolling 24-hour basis. The majority of these coins were transferred to exchanges at a lower price than when they last moved onchain. Flows from this cohort are closely tracked because short-term holders tend to react fastest to news-driven sentiment, making their exchange deposits a useful gauge of how hard the legislative setback hit the market.

"With 23 200 BTC sent to exchanges at a loss, this STH capitulation event is the largest recorded over the past month," CryptoQuant reported in a blog post.

Previously, Cointelegraph reported that STH unrealized profitability had reached a key milestone for 2026, potentially boosting the odds of a long-term bullish BTC price trend change. With only a handful of procedural options left to revive the bill before 2027, the Coinbase-Binance split Woo outlined gives market watchers a real-time reference for how US and offshore demand continue to diverge as the legislative process plays out.