Bitcoin URPD (UTXO Realized Price Distribution)
A snapshot of the whole circulating supply grouped by cost basis — the price each coin last moved at — so you can see where holders sit in profit, where they’re underwater, and which price levels hold the most supply.
URPD — supply by cost basis
How much of today’s circulating supply last moved at each price level — its cost basis. Green bars (left of spot) hold coins whose cost basis is below today’s price (in profit); red bars (right of spot) are in loss, so the colour boundary marks the spot price. The price axis is log-spaced. A snapshot of the current UTXO set from the node’s cost-basis index × daily price — informational, not financial advice.
What URPD shows
URPD — UTXO Realized Price Distribution, also called supply by cost basis — takes every coin in existence and sorts it by the price at which it last moved on-chain (its cost basis, or realized price). Each bar is the amount of BTC whose most recent move happened while price sat inside that range. Read across, it answers a question a price chart can’t: at what prices did today’s supply actually change hands?
The metric was introduced by analyst Renato Shirakashi in 2020 and popularised by Glassnode. Unlike the time-series charts elsewhere on the site, URPD is a single-day snapshot — a photograph of where cost basis sits right now, not how it got there.
How it’s built
Every unspent output carries the market price of the day it was created — the day that coin last moved. We take the current UTXO set from our own Bitcoin full node’s cost-basis index, stamp each coin with the price on its last-move day, and sum the BTC that falls into each price bucket. The price axis is log-spaced, so cheap early-cycle coins and today’s five- and six-figure prices are both legible on one chart, and each bar is coloured by whether its price sits below or above spot. Because it’s keyed to each coin’s last move, the whole picture is recomputed every day straight from the live chain — no vendor feed involved.
How to read it — walls, gaps, and the profit line
Two shapes carry the story. Thick clusters of supply — cost-basis walls — mark price zones where a large amount of coin last changed hands. When price revisits a wall, a big group of holders reaches break-even together, which is why those levels tend to react. A wall above the current price acts as overhead resistance: as price rises into it, holders who were underwater there finally reach break-even and many sell, capping the move. A wall below the current price acts as support: as price falls back to a level where a lot of supply was acquired, that demand zone tends to hold.
Thin stretches are air gaps — prices where little supply has its cost basis. With less on-chain supply to absorb a move, price tends to travel through a gap faster. The dashed spot line splits the distribution in two: everything green to its left is held in profit (cost basis below today’s price), everything red to its right is underwater. As always, these are tendencies in how holders have behaved — not a forecast. A wall can hold, or price can cut straight through it.
Caveats
Cost basis resets on any on-chain move — a consolidation, an exchange wallet migration or a self-transfer restamps those coins at the current price and can raise a fresh wall even though nobody bought or sold. A single tall bar isn’t always many independent buyers, either: it can be one entity’s cold storage. Because we key off raw on-chain age rather than clustering wallets by entity, we can’t strip exchange-held clusters out — so read very large single bars with that in mind (Glassnode has publicly flagged such clusters as supply to ignore).
Lost and long-dormant coins keep an old, low cost basis forever, gently thickening the cheapest buckets with supply that will likely never trade. And it’s a snapshot: to see accumulation or distribution you compare URPD across days, not within a single chart. Informational, not advice.
Frequently asked
What is Bitcoin URPD (UTXO Realized Price Distribution)?
URPD is a snapshot of the entire current Bitcoin supply grouped by cost basis — the price at which each coin last moved on-chain. Each bar shows how much BTC last transacted inside that price range, so the chart maps where holders’ cost basis is concentrated today. It is a point-in-time picture, not a time series.
How do you read a URPD chart?
Tall bars are “cost-basis walls” — price zones where a lot of supply last changed hands. When price returns to a wall, many holders reach break-even at once, so those levels tend to react: a wall above the current price acts as overhead resistance (rallies stall as underwater holders sell at break-even), while a wall below the current price acts as support (a demand zone price tends to hold). Sparse stretches are “air gaps” where little supply has its cost basis, so price can travel through them with less on-chain friction.
What do the green and red bars mean?
The colour boundary is the current spot price. Green bars sit below spot — those coins last moved at a lower price, so they are held in unrealized profit. Red bars sit above spot — that supply is underwater, held at a loss. The balance of green versus red shows how much of the supply is currently in profit.
Is URPD a buy or sell signal?
No. URPD is an informational map of where supply’s cost basis sits, not financial advice. It shows where reactions could cluster based on what has already happened on-chain; it does not predict price, and is best read alongside metrics like SOPR and realized price.
Informational, not financial advice.