The Cost Basis of the Nervous

*Every coin has a memory of what it cost. On-chain, that memory is public. Split the supply by how long each coin has sat still, and a line emerges: the average price paid by everyone who bought recently — the last five months or so. These are the twitchy hands, the ones still close enough to their entry to panic. In a bull run, price keeps bouncing off that line like a floor. In a bear, it keeps rejecting* off it like a ceiling. Same number, opposite meaning, depending on the tide.

The Short-Term Holder realized price is the aggregate cost basis of coins that last moved within roughly the last 155 days. Because every coin's most recent movement is timestamped on-chain, and every movement has a price attached, you can take all the 'young' coins — those moved inside that window — and compute the volume-weighted average price at which they last changed hands. That number is the break-even of the market's newest, most reactive participants. STH-MVRV is simply spot price divided by that cost basis: above 1.0, recent buyers are collectively in profit; below 1.0, they are underwater.

The intuition rests on a behavioural asymmetry. Recent buyers have no cushion. A holder who bought years ago and is sitting on a 5x can watch a 30% drawdown without flinching; a holder who bought last month at a price now 10% higher is one bad candle from break-even and one bad week from a loss they can't stomach. So the STH cost basis becomes a psychological pivot. When price falls toward it in an uptrend, that cohort's coins are near break-even — dip-buyers step in to defend their entry, and the level acts as dynamic support. When price rallies up to it in a downtrend, the same underwater holders sell into strength to escape at cost — and the level acts as resistance.

This is why the STH line is a tactical gauge rather than a valuation one. Slower metrics like MVRV-Z or realized-cap tell you roughly where you sit in the multi-year cycle. The STH cost basis tells you where the near-term battle is being fought — the price at which the marginal, emotionally-exposed buyer flips from defending to capitulating. It moves faster because its cohort turns over faster, and it tracks the market closely enough to be read like a moving support/resistance band rather than a distant fair-value anchor.

The 155-day threshold is the load-bearing assumption. It comes from the empirical observation that coins tend to become far less likely to move once they cross roughly five months of age — the probability of an old coin transacting drops off, so ~155 days became the conventional line where 'short-term, still-trading' hands give way to 'long-term, dormant' conviction. It is a statistical regularity, not a law of the protocol. Nothing on-chain enforces it; it is a modelling choice that happens to carve the supply along a real behavioural fault line most of the time.

STH realized price = (Σ value_last_moved for coins aged < 155d) / (STH supply)
STH-MVRV = spot price / STH realized price
Support/resistance flip: price − STH_realized_price crosses zero