The Bitcoin price saw notable swings last week, briefly topping $79,000 before sliding to about $75,500 at the end of April. Early May has started brighter, with BTC trading near $78,000. That price uptick hints at improving sentiment, but on-chain indicators suggest demand remains too weak to sustain a full recovery across Bitcoin and possibly the wider crypto market.
CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost wrote in a Quicktake that despite a more than 30% rally from cycle lows, there’s no clear shift in the underlying price regime. Their focus is the Apparent Demand metric, which compares newly mined BTC to coins unmoved for over a year. While this metric has improved from a low near -89,000 BTC in early April, it remains negative: the 30-day sum is around -44,700 BTC.
Darkfost noted that the only recent positive blip at the end of February wasn’t genuine demand but a sharp drop in issuance caused by reduced mining activity—largely weather-related disruptions in the U.S. The analyst argues that meaningful, sustained price recovery will require genuine increases in market appetite; historically, BTC price movements have aligned closely with shifts in Apparent Demand. Investors should therefore watch for the metric turning consistently positive as a sign that demand is sufficient to support higher prices.
At the time of writing, BTC sits near $78,334, up just over 2% in the last 24 hours. The Apparent Demand trend’s gradual improvement is encouraging, but until the indicator moves decisively into positive territory, the recovery’s durability remains in question.
Featured image from iStock, chart from TradingView