Bitcoin Bearish Signal: Large Dormant Supply On The Move

On-chain data shows a large amount of old Bitcoin supply has moved in the last few days, something that could be bearish for the crypto’s price.

As pointed out by an analyst in a CryptoQuant post, a total of four large transfers with old supply have taken place in the last week. The relevant indicator here is the “Spent Output Age Bands” (SOAB), which tells us the total number of coins that each age band is moving on the chain right now.

The age bands refer to supply groups divided based on the criteria of the age of the coins (or more precisely, of the UTXOs). For example, the 1m-3m age band includes all coins that have been sitting dormant inside the same addresses since at least 1 month ago and at most 3 months ago. The SOAB metric for this group would then measure the total number of these coins that have been transferred to another wallet.

Now, the age bands of interest here are the 2y-3y and 3y-5y groups. Typically, investors that have been holding their coins since more than 155 days ago are said to be the “long-term holders” (LTHs), so both these bands include coins belonging to two different segments of the LTHs.

Also, it’s a statistical fact that the longer investors hold onto their BTC, the less probable they become to sell at any point. This implies that the holders with such aged supply as in these bands would be some of the most resolute HODLers in the market.

Here is a chart that shows the SOAB data for these two Bitcoin age bands over the past week:

As the above graph displays, there have been four large movements of coins belonging to these cohorts in the last few days. Three of these transfers were from the 2y-3y age band, while one was from the 3y-5y group.

The spike from the latter cohort was significantly larger than the others, amounting to more than 15,000 BTC being moved. All the transfers from the 2y-3y age band combined came to almost 13,000 BTC, which is still less than the 3y-5y group’s transactions.

Generally, large movements of such old Bitcoin supply is a sign of dumping from the LTHs, and if it’s the case here as well, then it would mean that the current market broke these so-called diamond hands into selling.

The quant notes that these transfers were at least not headed towards exchanges, which does reduce the probability of these transactions being for selling purposes (but obviously doesn’t eliminate the chances, as these investors could just have been selling through OTC deals).

Regardless of that, however, the analyst cautions, “it is very surprising to see FOUR of these transactions in one week. It is definitely worth watching in the next period.”

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $16,700, up 1% in the last week.