Bitcoin’s spot price fell on Aug. 19 while realized cap climbed, a textbook case of how on-chain cost basis can advance even on a red day.
The daily close dropped 2.94% from $116,284 on Aug. 18 to $112,861 on Aug. 19. The realized cap rose by $1.172 billion over the same window, from $1.038456 trillion to $1.039628 trillion.
The move looks odd only if you treat realized cap as a mark-to-market gauge. It is not. It revalues coins only when they move on-chain and assigns each moving coin the price at the time of that move. Coins that sit still retain their prior basis, so most of the supply remains anchored while a thin slice of transacting supply reshapes the aggregate.
Mechanically, each UTXO that moves contributes the difference between the price at move time and its previous basis. If a coin last moved years ago at $8,000 and transacts near $113,000, its realized value jumps by about $105,000.
Repeat that effect across enough low-basis supply, and the sum can rise even as the daily close is lower than the day before. The price drop only drags realized cap if many coins move at prices below their old basis, which would register as significant realized losses.
Issuance adds a steady tailwind. With a 3.125 BTC block subsidy and roughly 144 blocks per day, about 450 new BTC enter the ledger daily.
Valued at the day’s low, approximately $50.8 million was inserted into the realized cap on Aug. 19. That covers about 4.3% of the $1.172 billion increase. The rest, roughly $1.121 billion, came from repricing existing coins above their historical bases as they moved.
This pattern tells you that turnover on Aug. 19 skewed toward older, cheaper supply being spent at current prices, while recent high-basis coins largely stayed put.
Because realized cap only moves when coins do, it often drifts higher during uptrends and can hold firm during shallow pullbacks if spending is dominated by long-dormant coins realizing gains.
The mirror image shows up in true stress events, when a large slice of recent buyers moves coins at losses, pulling the realized cap lower alongside the price.
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Source: https://cryptoslate.com/insights/why-bitcoins-realized-cap-spiked-as-price-fell-to-122k/
