Recent on-chain and exchange data are raising an important question for Bitcoin market participants: where has the retail trading frenzy gone? Glassnode’s expanding metric suite and new CryptoQuant analyses offer a more detailed picture of Bitcoin’s cycle position, while Binance futures and spot ETF flows highlight how institutional and retail behavior may be shifting.
Glassnode, founded by Rafael Schultze-Kraft and Jan Happel, now tracks more than 800 Bitcoin metrics, including entity-adjusted MVRV, SOPR, and NUPL. In Q1 2026, with Bitcoin trading near $69,000, the MVRV Z-Score was about 1.2, down from 3.8 at the October 2025 cycle high near $126,000. By May 2026, the MVRV Z-Score had compressed to roughly 0.8–1.0, while the MVRV ratio stood near 1.4 and SOPR was around break-even. NUPL registered approximately 0.28, placing the market in Glassnode’s “Optimism/Anxiety” band.
Exchange flow metrics remain central to Glassnode’s analysis. Bitcoin exchange reserves fell to around three million coins by mid-2026, a drawdown that coincided with rising spot Bitcoin ETF adoption. Glassnode also expanded into derivatives analytics in late 2025, adding options volume breakdowns for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, XRP, and PAXG. In 2026, it extended perpetual futures order book metrics to Solana, BNB, XRP, HYPE, TRON, and Dogecoin.
Separately, CryptoQuant analysis published on November 6 found that retail trading activity never surged around Bitcoin’s October 2025 record or its subsequent lows near $60,000. One explanation is that retail demand may have migrated into spot ETFs, where trading occurs through brokerages and does not appear in exchange trade counts. However, US spot Bitcoin ETFs shed about $399 million on November 2, led by roughly $405 million leaving BlackRock’s IBIT, which weakens the migration argument for that week.
Binance data also requires careful interpretation. Hackers drained about $6.3 billion from Binance on October 29, and the exchange suspended withdrawals before reopening them and saying it had covered 95% of stolen assets. Binance Bitcoin futures open interest fell to $8.7 billion, the lowest in more than two months. But when converted to BTC terms, exposure actually held steady around 114,500 BTC, compared with about 113,300 BTC before the hack. This suggests the dollar decline was largely a price effect rather than a genuine unwind of Bitcoin futures positions.
The combined data supports a narrower conclusion: Binance derivatives traders kept roughly the same coin exposure through the hack, while ETF holders were net sellers in the days before the futures low. The missing retail surge remains unresolved, and future readings on Binance open interest, ETF creations and redemptions, and CryptoQuant’s retail trading-frequency gauge will be key to determining whether retail is truly retreating or simply changing venues.
