Metrics
HODL Waves
How long whales have held their coins, grouped by age band
What is HODL Waves?
Stacked-area chart of unspent BTC by age cohort (1d, 1w, 1m, 3m, 6m, 1y, 2y, 5y, 10y+). Growing 1y+ band = accumulation; shrinking 5y+ band = old-coin selling. We compute this for ~300 top whales daily, not chain-wide.
What do whale HODL waves show today?
| BTC tracked in the cohort | 1,522,984 BTC |
|---|---|
| Share held 1 year or longer | 55.9 % |
| Largest age band | 1y (29.0 %) |
| Age bands measured | 9 |
| Snapshot | 2026-08-24 |
How to read this. Each band is the share of tracked whale BTC whose coins last moved that long ago. A rising long-end (1y+) means large holders are sitting still. A swelling short end means coins that had been dormant are being moved again — which is what usually precedes exchange activity.
How we calculate it. Daily from our own Bitcoin node. We take addresses holding between 100 and 100,000 BTC that have at least 3 recorded transactions, exclude anything labelled as an exchange, then bucket each unspent output by the age of the block that created it.
Where this approximates. This is a whale cohort, not the whole market — the scan is capped at the 300 largest qualifying addresses to bound database load, and the upper bound of 100,000 BTC deliberately drops custody aggregators. Retail and mid-size holders are not represented at all. An address can appear in several age bands at once, because its individual outputs have different ages.
Snapshot 2026-08-24 · source: our own Bitcoin node · rebuilt daily