HODL Waves

HODL Waves stack the Bitcoin supply by coin age at every daily close. The sage band is long-term-holder supply — coins last spent at least 155 days ago. The rust band is short-term-holder supply — coins last spent within the trailing 155 days. The two sum to 100 % of circulating supply by construction; the hairline through the stack is the LTH dominance line itself, and Bitcoin’s USD price runs muted on the log left axis for cycle context.

Today the LTH band reads 80.0% of circulating supply, with a trailing 90-day change of +8.7 pts — the Accumulating regime. The series stretches from 18 Aug 2011 through to the most recent close on 30 Apr 2026. The 0.78 and 0.55 reference hairlines on the chart bracket the typical cycle-bottom and cycle-top LTH dominance readings on the post-2014 record.

For each daily close t:

LTH(t) = supply held in UTXOs last spent ≥ 155 days ago / circulating(t)
STH(t) = 1 − LTH(t)

The 155-day cohort boundary follows the convention Rafael Schultze-Kraft and Kilian Heeg established in their 2020 cohort-analysis paper, where they identified the day count at which an unspent transaction output’s conditional spend probability flattens to a near-constant baseline. Below 155 days a coin is statistically much more likely to be moved next week than next year; above it, the conditional spend probability barely changes with further age. The boundary is empirical, not arbitrary, and is the same threshold used for SOPR and cohort realized price.

The framework itself comes from Dhruv Bansal’s Bitcoin Data Science (Pt. 1): HODL Waves, published in April 2018. Bansal’s original chart slices supply into a dozen age bands; the two-bucket form on this page collapses those bands at the 155-day threshold and is sufficient for the cycle-level conclusions. The 90-day change in LTH dominance is the direction signal documented inline in the reading row. Reconstruction details live on the methodology page.

The legible cycle pattern is the LTH band swelling and contracting. During accumulation phases — the months and quarters following a cycle low — coins absorbed by patient holders age past 155 days and the LTH share rises. During distribution phases — the months and quarters around a cycle top — those same coins move and reset into the STH bucket. The 90-day change in LTH dominance is the direction signal; the absolute level shifts higher every cycle as the network matures, so a 70% reading in 2014 and a 70% reading in 2024 are not the same regime.

Reading every cycle anchor against the live series surfaces the regime-shift pattern with no further commentary needed. Cycle tops have printed progressively shallower distribution — the LTH band drained to the low 50s in 2013 and 2017, only to the low 60s in 2021, and into the upper 60s in March 2024. Cycle lows have printed progressively shallower accumulation — LTH peaked near 80% in 2015, slightly above in 2019, and sat in the high 70s through the late-2022 trough. Both extremes are compressing.

The cleanest way to see the 2024 anomaly is the per-cycle peak-to-trough swing of LTH dominance. Each cycle has an accumulation peak (LTH share at its cycle maximum, typically 6–12 months before the price top) and a distribution trough (LTH share at its cycle minimum, typically within a quarter of the price top). The difference is the magnitude of cohort rotation in that cycle.

Three observations carry through the swing table. First, every modern cycle has redistributed less than the one before it. The 2013 distribution drained over 25 points of dominance from accumulation peak to topping trough; the 2017 cycle was similar; the 2021 cycle drained roughly 15–18; and the 2024 cycle to date has drained the smallest band of any cycle since cohort data has been available. The pattern fits the broader maturation story — MVRV, Puell, and NUPL all show the same shrinking-amplitude trajectory at the network scale.

Second, the institutional-custody era complicates the read. A spot-ETF custody wallet that holds coins for years on behalf of underlying shareholders ages those coins through the 155-day boundary identically to a self-custody cold-storage wallet. The on-chain record shows accumulation; the underlying ownership may have churned through hundreds of distinct shareholders without a single chain transaction. Cohort dominance is a supply-age statement, not an ownership statement, and the gap between the two has widened materially since January 2024.

Third, the 2024 reading has surfaced a new behaviour worth flagging. James Check has documented that long-term-holder supply remained anchored in the high 70s through a drawdown of roughly 21% from the all-time high — behaviour that prior cycles did not exhibit at comparable price drawdowns. Whether this reflects structurally stronger holder conviction, the new mechanics of ETF custody, or simply the not-yet-completed distribution phase of an in-progress cycle is the question this chart will answer over the next several quarters.

For a dollar-cost-averaging investor. Sustained LTH-dominance readings above 78% have historically bracketed cycle-bottom regions. The signal is slow — the band moves on a quarterly timescale, not a daily one — and the modern compression toward shallower accumulation peaks means the high-78 region itself is hitting later in cycles. Treat sustained 90-day-positive change in LTH dominance as a tactical accumulation accelerator; do not wait for an 80% print, because the modern peaks have not gone there.

For a cycle-timing trader. The cleaner topping signal is the direction of the 90-day LTH change crossing from positive to sustained negative. Pair the read with cohort SOPR for the realised-profit cross-check and RHODL for the older-cohort tilt. HODL Waves alone is a slow signal; the modern compression means a peak-to-trough swing under 12 percentage points may not even register as “distribution” on the historical scale, even when a cycle top has passed.

For a researcher. The series carries the per-day STH and LTH shares plus the implied total supply. The 155-day boundary is the same one used across every cohort indicator on this site, so cross-comparison is direct. The cohort-attribution gap introduced by ETF custody is not yet documented in any single canonical paper; the methodology page records the assumption explicitly.

Cohort dominance is not ownership. A spot-ETF custodian holding coins for years on behalf of underlying shareholders shows on-chain as a single long-term-holder address; the underlying ownership may rotate through every redemption cycle without any chain transaction. The 2024-onward reading is structurally less informative about distinct-holder behaviour than the pre-2024 reading was. Ownership churn that used to print on chain now prints in custodian books.

The 155-day boundary is empirical, not load-bearing. A coin crossing the cohort line on day 156 reads as “long-term”; the same coin on day 154 reads as “short-term”. Spending probability does flatten near 155 days, but the boundary is a convenient cut, not a phase transition. Treat readings near the boundary — the months following a regime change, when many coins are aging through — with care.

Lost coins inflate LTH dominance. Every Patoshi-era coin that has not moved since 2010 is permanently in the long-term bucket. The persistent ~1.1 million Satoshi-era coins identified in independent Patoshi research, plus the broader 2.78–3.79 million BTC range that Chainalysis estimates as lost, all sit in the LTH band by construction. The structural LTH baseline is a few percentage points above what an active-supply-only series would read.

Custodial reshuffles fire false signals. A single exchange cold-wallet rotation can move tens of thousands of BTC across the cohort boundary in a day. The 90-day change smooths most of that noise; spot reads around large custody movements should be treated as transitional rather than substantive.

Canonical questions from Google’s “People also ask” block for bitcoin hodl waves and long term holder supply, answered against the data on this page.