Bitcoin Apparent Demand Remains Weak — What This Says About Price Recovery

The Bitcoin price had quite an interesting performance over the past week, cruising to a new high above the $79,000 high early on before crashing to as low as $75,500 on the last day of April. However, the premier cryptocurrency has had a somewhat bright start to May, hovering around the $78,000 level. While the subtle price action resurgence suggests improving market sentiment, on-chain data shows that current demand is still insufficient to fuel a full recovery for Bitcoin — and perhaps the rest of the crypto market.

In a recent Quicktake post on the CryptoQuant platform, pseudonymous analyst Darkfost stated that the underlying Bitcoin market demand has remained weak despite the price rebound over the past two months. According to the crypto pundit, there is no current evidence of a shift in the price regime, despite BTC rising by more than 30% from its cycle lows.

Drawing inferences from the Apparent Demand metric, which measures demand by comparing the freshly mined BTC to the amount of unmoved coin in over a year, Darkfost reiterated that market appetite has remained weak. Indeed, the metric has seen some recovery — as has price — from the ghastly -89,000 BTC in early April.

However, CryptoQuant data shared by the analyst shows that the apparent demand (30-day sum) is still negative at -44,700 BTC. Darkfost revealed that the Bitcoin Apparent Demand metric has been in the red all year, except for a brief period in February, when BTC mining activity saw a sharp decline.

Darkfost explained in their Quicktake post:

I am excluding the brief positive shift at the end of February, as it was not driven by a genuine increase in demand, but rather by a sharp drop in BTC issuance. This was mainly due to a significant decline in mining activity, particularly linked to severe weather conditions in the United States earlier in the year.

The analyst noted that while the apparent demand trend shows signs of improvement over the past few weeks, market appetite needs to improve further to create the appropriate environment to support a sustainable Bitcoin price recovery. As seen in previous trends, the price of BTC is directly related to the Apparent Demand indicator. Hence, investors need to watch out for when the metric turns positive.

As of this writing, the price of BTC stands at around $78,334, reflecting an over 2% jump in the past 24 hours.