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This year’s average purchase price is around $97,880, leaving investors facing an almost 20% unrealized loss at current prices.
By James Van Straten|Edited by Sheldon Reback
Feb 28, 2025, 9:08 a.m. UTC
What to know:
- Bitcoin is down 22% in February, and just under 18% this week.
- Both measures are the BTC’s worst since 2022.
- The average purchase price of bitcoin this year is about $97,880, with investors facing an unrealized loss of more than 18%.
Bitcoin (BTC) is on track for its worst month in three years, falling 22% as President Donald Trump’s tariffs on major U.S. trading partners raise concerns of faster inflation, reduced chance of interest-rate cuts and lowered appetite for risky investments.
The last time the largest cryptocurrency fell as much as June 2022, when it fell by more than a third. This week alone, BTC has dropped almost 18%, the steepest slide since the week ended Nov. 13 of the same year.
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
The slide leaves investors who’ve bought bitcoin this year severely underwater. The average purchase price is since the start of January $97,880, and BTC dropped below $80,000 earlier Friday, leaving average buyer some 18% worse off.
Historically, this isn’t entirely unusual. Investors often face some unrealized losses at the start of the year. It happens when the price of bitcoin falls below the cost basis of the recipients before recovering later in the year.
On-chain data indicates that realized losses escalated as the price fell. Over the past three days, about $1 billion in realized losses have been recorded daily — the most since August’s yen carry trade unwind, when bitcoin fell to $49,000.
Additionally, a whopping $1.1 trillion has been wiped off the crypto market cap, taking the total to $2.59 trillion, according to TradingView metric, Total.
James Van Straten is a Senior Analyst at CoinDesk, specializing in Bitcoin and its interplay with the macroeconomic environment. Previously, James worked as a Research Analyst at Saidler & Co., a Swiss hedge fund, where he developed expertise in on-chain analytics. His work focuses on monitoring flows to analyze Bitcoin’s role within the broader financial system.
In addition to his professional endeavors, James serves as an advisor to Coinsilium, a UK publicly traded company, where he provides guidance on their Bitcoin treasury strategy. He also holds investments in Bitcoin, MicroStrategy (MSTR), and Semler Scientific (SMLR).
