Long-term Bitcoin bulls hodl strong despite five-month price high

On-chain analytics provider Glassnode reported that long-term Bitcoin (BTC) holders are refusing to sell despite the BTC markets rallying to a five-month price high.

In its Monday “Week On-chain” report, Glassnode noted that “long-term holders” — BTC wallets that have not seen outflows for more than 155 days — are currently sitting on nearly 13.3 million BTC or 70% of Bitcoin’s supply.

The report notes that long-term holders have increased their collective stash by more than 2.37 million BTC (roughly $134 billion at current prices) over the past seven months. With only 186,000 BTC being newly minted by miners during the same period, Glassnode concluded that long-term whales are accumulating 12.7 times more BTC than is created.

Despite long-term holders refusing to sell, Glassnode noted an uptick in on-chain activity as Bitcoin’s price pushed up to a local high of $57,860 on Tuesday.

October has seen the number of active addresses on-chain increase 19% to 291,000 — levels not seen since the lead up to December 2020’s meteoric bull-trend. Glassnode suggested the spike in activity could foreshadow further bullish momentum, stating:

“More active market participants have historically correlated with growing interest in the asset during early stage bull markets.”

The report also noted an increase in median transaction size to roughly 1.3 BTC per transfer, suggesting an increase in institutional-sized capital flows on-chain. During August, the median transaction size fell as low as 0.6 BTC per transfer.

Last week, the Bitcoin network registered its highest ever daily value settlement of $31 billion.

Related: Bitcoin outflows from centralized exchanges surge to 100K BTC monthly

On Tuesday, Glassnode reported that Bitcoin balances on centralized exchanges had fallen to a three-year low of 2.4 million BTC, further evidencing many investors are choosing to hodl for higher prices.

Industry observers have suggested that whales could be front-running the BTC markets in anticipation of a Bitcoin exchange-traded fund approval this month.