The “whale awakening” in figures
In July 2025, analysts observed eight Satoshi-era wallets, each containing 10,000 BTC, transfer their coins for the first time in 14 years.
A total of 80,000 Bitcoin (BTC) (around $8.6 billion at the time) shifted from long-dormant addresses in a single episode observed onchain. Blockchain analysts traced these coins back to 2011, when they were purchased for less than $210,000 in total, indicating a return of nearly 4,000,000%.
In July 2025, two separate wallets, each with 10,000 BTC and inactive since 2011, were reactivated. With Bitcoin at approximately $108,000, each address unexpectedly held over $1 billion.
Data from Lookonchain and Whale Alert reveals that over 62,800 BTC left wallets older than seven years in early to mid-2025, more than double the amount during the same period in 2024, as highlighted by MarketWatch.
Indeed, the whale awakening signifies a period when very old coins begin to circulate, long-term holder balances decrease from record highs, and the typical whale profile evolves.
For regular users, this raises questions: Who truly owns Bitcoin, how concentrated is that ownership, and how do dormant balances impact liquidity conditions upon movement?
Did you know? Recent analysis revealed that just 83 wallets account for about 11.2% of the entire BTC supply, with the top four wallets alone controlling around 3.23%.
How analysts assess whales and dormancy
Bitcoin’s design makes dormancy observable. Each coin exists in a UTXO, or unspent transaction output, marked with a timestamp of its last movement, transforming the ledger into a chronological series of coin “ages.”
A key tool in this area is HODL Waves. Introduced by Dhruv Bansal at Unchained Capital and later refined by Glassnode, HODL Waves categorizes all coins into age bands (e.g., 1 day-1 week, 1-3 months, 1-2 years, and 5+ years). It illustrates the thickness of each band over time, resembling geological layers that depict patterns in holding and spending activity.
Within that chart are coin age metrics:
“Coin days destroyed” (CDD) and related measures utilized by CryptoQuant, Bitbo and others multiply the quantity of coins moved by their dormancy duration, giving extra weight to very old coins.
Santiment’s “age consumed” and “dormant circulation” models use similar logic across various assets. Significant spikes typically signify that long-held coins are being spent, as outlined in Santiment Academy.
To differentiate whales from regular traders, analytics firms categorize holders based on both holding period and entity.
For example, Glassnode’s long-term holder (LTH) framework categorizes coins as long-term after being held for about 155 days, based on behavioral thresholds in historical data discussed in Glassnode Insights and documentation.
Naturally, these metrics are entity-adjusted. Clustering algorithms estimate which addresses belong to the same real-world participant before analyzing balances and ages.
Did you know? Different onchain analytics firms set varying whale cutoffs. Some consider entities holding 1,000+ BTC, while others focus on ranges such as 100-10,000 BTC.
All these tools are descriptive. They quantify how concentrated holdings are, the age of that supply, and when old coins resurface. They do not inherently inform anyone what actions to take with their money.
What the 2024-2025 data reveals about whale reactivation
With this toolkit at hand, the crucial question is whether this cycle is fundamentally different or simply more pronounced in dollar terms.
Onchain series indicate a significant change in observed onchain behavior:
Glassnode’s long-term holder supply, which tracks coins held for around five months or longer, reached record highs in late 2024, then began to roll over into 2025.
Simultaneously, its illiquid supply metric ceased climbing and started to decline, suggesting that some of the most persistent long-term coins are finally moving after years of net accumulation.
Meanwhile, HODL Wave-style charts exhibit a slight dip in the percentage of supply in the 5+ year band, while the 6-12 month and 1-2 year bands have thickened.
This pattern typically arises when very old coins are spent once and then transition into newer wallets. A segment of the ancient layer is chipped off and reallocated to fresh ownership without necessarily going directly to exchanges.
High-profile examples complement this:
The Satoshi-era clusters that moved tens of thousands of BTC after more than a decade of inactivity rest atop a steady increase in reactivated seven-to-10-year-old coins.
Various “sleeping beauty” wallets from 2011 to 2013, each containing 1,000-10,000 BTC, have become active in dashboards throughout 2024 and 2025, reinforcing the idea of an awakening of early cycle supply rather than a single isolated event.
Crucially, the movement of dormant coins does not automatically imply selling activity. Firms specializing in address tagging can often identify exchange wallets, crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and over-the-counter (OTC) desks. In several prominent instances, dormant coins transitioned into other self-custody addresses, multisig structures, or internal restructuring targets without an immediate increase in exchange inflows linked to those specific transactions.
In some cases, movement coincided with legal disputes, tax events, or corporate actions, suggesting custody reshuffles rather than short-term trading.
A careful interpretation of these patterns is:
A historically large base of long-term holders developed through previous cycles
A visible but controlled reduction of that base
A gradual redistribution of extremely old coins into newer ownership.
This combination is what analysts refer to as a whale awakening, a time when historical supply moves gradually and can be tracked in real-time onchain.
Reasons behind current whale movements
Onchain data cannot read minds but can reveal where whale behavior aligns with clear incentives and pressures. Several explanations are consistent with the evidence and analyst research.
Profit-taking in deep liquidity
Glassnode and others have demonstrated that long-term holder supply often peaks prior to or during new all-time highs before entering a distribution phase. At these moments, realized capitalization and market value to realized value (MVRV), concepts formalized by Coin Metrics and popularized by Nic Carter and colleagues, indicate that long-term holders possess substantial unrealized gains.
For early adopters who have held for seven to ten years, even slight sales would represent significant historical gains for long-term holders without fully exiting Bitcoin.
Portfolio and venue reallocation
Some dormant coins have been traced into institutional custody, multisig setups, or ETF custodians, marking a transition from personal cold storage to regulated vehicles. Cross-chain flow trackers have also identified old BTC moving alongside new positions in ETH or other major assets, suggesting internal reallocations rather than complete exits.
Legal and administrative triggers
Tax events, lawsuits, inheritance issues, and corporate restructurings can all prompt coins that have remained untouched for a decade into motion. It is not unusual for whale movements to coincide with public legal disputes or regulatory actions, showcasing how court orders and compliance obligations can rouse inactive balances even if the investment rationale remains the same.
Age-related structural effects
As Unchained Capital’s “Geology of Lost Coins” framework notes, each cycle leaves a thicker layer of long, unmoved coins. Some are genuinely lost, while others belong to individuals, companies, or estates.
Over time, more holders reach moments of rebalancing, succession, or custody upgrades, naturally resulting in more awakenings each year, even if they still constitute a small percentage of the total supply.
Remember, none of these factors exclude one another, and none can be confirmed solely from the ledger. Onchain data can show which coins moved and where they went, but it cannot disclose why the transaction occurred.
Did you know? As of mid-2025, credible onchain estimates suggest that 2.3 million-3.7 million BTC, up to about 18% of the total supply, is irretrievably lost due to forgotten keys, destroyed wallets, or otherwise inaccessible addresses.
How ordinary users should interpret the whale awakening
For most individuals, whale metrics work best as transparency and context tools.
When encountering headlines about whales selling, contextual inquiries commonly considered include:
Are coins flowing to exchange wallets, ETFs, OTC desks, or primarily into new self-custody and multisig addresses?
Does the movement align with broader trends in long-term holder supply, illiquid supply, and age bands, or is it an isolated outlier?
Are metrics like CDD, age consumed, spent output profit ratio, and MVRV signaling a regime change or merely responding to a brief surge of old coins moving?
Additionally, it’s valuable to remember the limitations of attribution:
Labels such as “exchange,” “ETF,” “government,” or “whale” depend on heuristics and clustering. Different analytics firms may classify the same entity differently, and some large holders remain unclassified.
Any narrative regarding who is moving coins is at best an informed approximation built on top of the raw ledger.
What whale metrics cannot do is reliably predict the future intentions of a specific holder or guarantee that past dormancy and reactivation patterns will recur. Developing a basic understanding of onchain concepts, supplementing it with independent research, maintaining a clear sense of personal risk tolerance, and seeking professional advice when necessary is a more dependable approach than attempting to guess why large holders transfer coins.
