While traders were sleeping—or doom-scrolling their feeds at 2 a.m.—more than a million bitcoins quietly crossed the 155-day threshold and joined the so-called long-term holder (LTH) cohort. It didn’t set off sirens on CNBC, but our group chats definitely lit up.
Here's What Actually Happened
CryptoQuant community sleuth Maartunn pushed out a chart on X late Sunday showing the LTH supply jumping by roughly 1,019,000 BTC between mid-September and mid-October. That’s close to 5.2% of the circulating supply maturing into long-term hands in just one month. The mirror image, of course, is a comparable drop from the short-term holder (STH) bucket.
If you zoom in on the on-chain waves, you can spot the exact moment: coins last moved around April 14-18 2023—right when BTC kissed $31.8k and then nosedived to $27k—have now aged past 155 days. They’re officially HODL waves instead of tourist waves.
Why the 1M Coin Shift Feels Different
We’ve seen LTH supply climb before, but a million-coin graduation in a single monthly candle is rare. A couple of angles are making the Telegram rooms buzz:
- Halving proximity: We’re ~170 days from the next block subsidy cut. Historically, LTH accumulation spikes 6-8 months pre-halving, but this spike came a bit earlier than expected.
- ETF speculation: BlackRock’s 19b-4 amendment and the recent courtroom win for Grayscale have many in TradFi playing wait-and-see. Our hunch is some of those April buyers refused to sell into Q3 chop, betting on an approval pop.
- Macro weirdness: The 10-year yield flirting with 5% and oil back above $90 usually slam risk-on assets. Yet BTC is still hovering near $27k. Maybe those coins matured because the owners simply forgot they existed (we’ve all pretended to ‘forget’ a wallet or two).
None of this guarantees a green candle tomorrow, but the supply squeeze narrative just got a fresh shot of espresso.
Voices From the Timeline
"If a million coins went cold, the float is thinner than people realize. Shorts are sitting on a keg of gunpowder." — @TedTalksMacro
"Meh, most of that cohort bought near 30k. Call me when they survive a 60% drawdown." — @MSarttro (resident skeptic)
Even Glassnode chimed in with a side-eye metric: the Realized Price of LTHs sits at $20,360, meaning the average cost basis for these matured coins is well below spot. As @_Checkmatey_ joked, “They’re basically playing with house money at this point.”
How We're Thinking About Our Bags
I’m not entirely sure what tomorrow’s CPI print will do to BTC, but here’s the internal debate most of us are having:
- Do we front-run the halving like 2020 and 2016, or has the market priced it in this time?
- Is the ETF catalyst still asymmetric, or did we burn that hopium during the August fake-filing fiasco?
- And how many times can macro dump on crypto before the decorrelation meme dies for good?
Personally, I’ve dusted off my DCA script and switched from weekly to bi-weekly buys. A buddy of mine is writing covered calls at $32k expiry, basically betting we crab until December. Another friend sold a chunk last week to chase airdrop rumors on a certain sui generis Layer-2 that shall remain nameless. We’re all coping differently.
The Tangent We Couldn't Resist
Quick sidebar: remember when Michael Saylor told us, “There is no second best”? MicroStrategy now controls 158,245 BTC. If these fresh LTH coins were a single entity, they’d outrank Saylor by ~6X. Food for thought next time someone equates ‘corporate treasury’ with ‘supply lock-up.’ The real whales might be thousands of plebs stacking 0.05 BTC at a time.
The Bit of Uncertainty We Can't Shake Off
Here’s the catch nobody likes talking about: LTH supply can shrink just as fast. 155 days from now is March 2024, smack in the middle of halving hype. If those April-’23 buyers finally break even or see $40k, will they really keep diamond hands?
I don’t know. You don’t know. Even Maartunn admitted in DM, “We’re good at tracking, terrible at predicting.” For now, though, the market just lost a giant chunk of liquid supply, and that might be the quietest bullish signal we’ve had all autumn.
Stay nimble, stay curious, and maybe—just maybe—stop panicking every time the DXY pops a green candle.
