The $80,000 Floor: ETF Cost Basis Part 1/3 [Report]

Bitcoin ETFs are sitting on $11.85 billion in unrealized profits. By every traditional measure, that’s success. The product works. Institutions showed up. Capital accumulated. But here’s what the headlines miss: 38% of all ETF holdings are underwater. That’s 596,842 BTC bought at prices above current spot. The aggregate is green. A significant minority is drowning.

This disconnect matters. Daily ETF flow reports tell you direction. Inflows, outflows, net change. They don’t tell you pain. They don’t reveal where the floor actually sits, the price level where institutional psychology shifts from “hold for recovery” to “cut losses.” Flow data shows you what happened yesterday. Cost basis analysis shows you what happens next.

What We Built. Using 3,133 daily flow records across 11 ETF issuers since January 2024, we reverse-engineered the cost basis of every dollar of institutional capital. The methodology is FIFO: first in, first out. When an ETF reports outflows, we assume they’re selling their oldest (cheapest) coins first. This mirrors how institutions actually account for positions and lets us track the true average entry price of remaining holdings.

The result is a complete map of where institutional money entered, where it accumulated most heavily, and where it starts to feel pain.

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