The Whales Who Accumulated Bitcoin in 2018 Are Hodling

More than 15% of the existing Bitcoin (BTC) supply has not moved in 12 to 18 months. This confirms that the second half of 2018 was an accumulation season, as much of the BTC acquired during that period has not moved since. 

According to Unchained Capital’s Hodl Waves, which determines the velocity of Bitcoins circulated by monitoring Bitcoin Unspent Transaction Outputs, or UXTOs, 41.6% of BTC supply moved over the past year. 

Bitcoin HODL Waves. Source: Unchained Capital

Coins that have remained idle for between three and five years comprise 14.4% of total BTC supply. More than 21% of Bitcoin’s supply has not moved since prior to 2015. Bitcoin that has not moved in two years represents 42% — comprising its highest threshold since June 2017.

Short-term holding is down since 2017

Since June 2017, short-term velocity has reduced slightly, with daily velocity averaging nearly 2% and weekly roughly 6.7% of the total supply. At the time of writing, 4.6% of all Bitcoin has moved in the last seven days — of which 1% circulated during the past 24 hours.

The percentage of coins circulating annually has also dropped more than 5% from 45.58% in February 2019 to 40.24% in February 2020.

Bitcoin fundamentals show strength

The rise in the number of idle BTC has increased alongside several indicators of fundamental strength for Bitcoin.

On March 1, the Bitcoin hash rate posted a new all-time high of over 136 million terahashes per second (TH/s). The record comes after BTC has continually tested the previous all-time high levels throughout 2020 so far and coincided with Sunday’s local price-low of roughly $8,500.

Bitcoin HODL Waves. Source: Blockchain.com

A report published by Glassnode on Feb. 27 also attested the fundamental strength of BTC, asserting that prices appear undervalued when considering on-chain activity.

Glassnode co-founder Jan Happel told Cointelegraph: 

“Network activity and growth are recovering from last year. For instance, entity adjusted transaction counts are trending upwards again. These are essentially the total number of transactions between different entities but it does not include transactions that occur within addresses of the same entity. The number of addresses with non-zero balances is also reaching new all-time highs each week.”