Bitcoin ‘Illiquid’ Supply Sets New All-Time High With 74% Dominance: What It Means

As a seasoned crypto investor with over a decade of experience in this wild and volatile market, I find the recent surge in Bitcoin’s Illiquid Supply particularly intriguing. The fact that around 74% of the circulating Bitcoin supply is currently ‘illiquid’ suggests that HODLers like myself are holding on tighter than ever before.


Recent on-chain data indicates that the illiquid supply of Bitcoin has reached a brand-new record high. Let’s discuss some potential implications for the asset.

Around 74% Of The Circulating Bitcoin Supply Is Currently ‘Illiquid’

In his latest blog post on X, analyst James Van Straten delved into the current movement in the Illiquid Supply of Bitcoin. The idea of ‘liquidity’ for Bitcoin originates from Glassnode, a firm specializing in on-chain analysis, which describes it as “the ratio of total outgoing and incoming transactions throughout an entity’s existence.

In this context, ‘entity’ represents a group of Bitcoin addresses that Glassnode has identified as belonging to the same individual investor. The entity can fall into one of three classifications: Illiquid, Liquid, or Highly Liquid, based on the value of this metric. Investors with a pattern of significant incoming transactions but minimal outgoing transactions are classified as Illiquid entities. In simpler terms, for an investor’s holdings to be categorized as part of the Illiquid Supply, the indicator’s value should typically be below 0.25.

At one extreme lies the Highly Liquid Supply, comprised of entities whose liquidity ratio exceeds 0.75 (essentially, those with inflows and outflows roughly equal). This group represents the BTC supply that’s frequently in motion. On the other hand, the Illiquid Supply refers to the portion of BTC that is unlikely to move soon, as it’s tied up in investors’ wallets who rarely sell. In essence, while the Highly Liquid Supply is like a fast-moving river, the Illiquid Supply can be thought of as frozen or static water.

Between the two lies the Liquid Asset Pool, where entities engage in differing levels of trading transactions (with liquidity ratios ranging from more than 0.25 to less than 0.75).

Keep in mind that the analytics firm uses a methodology where categories don’t experience sudden shifts at the boundaries; instead, the change from one supply category happens gradually. For instance, an entity with a liquidity ratio precisely equal to 0.25 would contribute half to the Illiquid category and half to the Liquid category.

Here’s a graph presented by Van Straten illustrating the patterns in both the Illiquid and Combined Liquid & Highly Liquid Bitcoin Supply.

Bitcoin ‘Illiquid’ Supply Sets New All-Time High With 74% Dominance: What It Means

From the graph presented, it’s clear that the Inactive Bitcoin Supply (or illiquid supply) has been steadily climbing since the start of the year. This suggests that dedicated investors, often referred to as ‘diamond hands’, have been accumulating coins. With the recent surge in this trend, the metric has reached a new all-time high (ATH) of approximately 14.7 million, representing roughly 74% of the total Bitcoin supply currently circulating.

According to the analyst, what’s intriguing is that the gap keeps widening between assets that are hard to sell (illiquid) and those that can be easily bought and sold (liquid + highly liquid). As trading opportunities decrease, there’s a growing preference among investors to ‘HODL’, or hold onto their assets.

BTC Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading at around $64,900, up more than 3% over the past week.

Bitcoin ‘Illiquid’ Supply Sets New All-Time High With 74% Dominance: What It Means

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2024-10-15 02:11