The “whale awakening” in numbers
In July 2025, analysts watched eight Satoshi-era wallets, each holding 10,000 BTC, move their coins for the first time in 14 years.
In total, 80,000 Bitcoin (BTC) (about $8.6 billion at the time) shifted out of long-dormant addresses in a single clustered episode of movement observed onchain. Blockchain sleuths traced these coins back to 2011, when they were acquired for under $210,000 in total, implying a return of nearly 4,000,000%.
Two separate wallets, each with 10,000 BTC and inactive since 2011, were also reactivated in July 2025. With Bitcoin around $108,000, each address suddenly controlled more than $1 billion.
Data from Lookonchain and Whale Alert indicates that over 62,800 BTC exited wallets older than seven years in early to mid-2025, more than double the amount in the same period in 2024, as highlighted by MarketWatch.
Indeed, the whale awakening is a period in which very old coins start to move, long-term holder balances ease down from record highs, and the typical whale profile changes.
For everyday users, this presents questions: Who actually holds Bitcoin, how concentrated is that ownership, and how do dormant balances interact with liquidity conditions when they move?
Did you know? One recent analysis found that just 83 wallets hold about 11.2% of all BTC supply and that the top four wallets alone control around 3.23%.
How analysts measure whales and dormancy
Bitcoin’s design makes dormancy visible. Every coin sits in a UTXO, or unspent transaction output, with a timestamp of when it last moved, turning the ledger into a time series of coin “ages.”
A core tool here is HODL Waves. Introduced by Dhruv Bansal at Unchained Capital and later formalized by Glassnode, HODL Waves groups all coins into age bands (for example, 1 day-1 week, 1-3 months, 1-2 years and 5+ years). It shows how thick each band is over time, like geological layers that illustrate patterns in holding and spending activity.
Inside that chart are coin age metrics:
“Coin days destroyed” (CDD) and related measures used by CryptoQuant, Bitbo and others multiply the number of coins moved by how long they were dormant, which gives extra weight to very old coins.
Santiment’s “age consumed” and “dormant circulation” models apply similar logic across many assets. Large spikes usually mean long-held coins are being spent, as outlined in Santiment Academy.
To distinguish whales from ordinary traders, analytics firms classify holders by both holding period and entity.
For example, Glassnode’s long-term holder (LTH) framework treats coins as long-term once they have been held for around 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 measuring balances and ages.
Did you know? Different onchain analytics firms set different whale cutoffs. Some look at entities holding 1,000+ BTC, while others focus on bands such as 100-10,000 BTC.
All of these tools are descriptive. They quantify how concentrated holdings are, how old that supply is and when old coins come back to life. They do not by themselves tell anyone what to do with their money.
What the 2024-2025 data shows about whale reactivation
With that toolkit in mind, the key question is whether this cycle is structurally different or simply louder in dollar terms.
Onchain series suggest a notable change in observed onchain behavior:
Glassnode’s long-term holder supply, which tracks coins held for around five months or more, hit record highs in late 2024 and then began to roll over into 2025.
At the same time, its illiquid supply metric stopped climbing and started to decline, which implies that some of the most stubborn long-term coins are finally moving after years of net accumulation.
Meanwhile, HODL Wave’s style charts show the share of supply in the 5+ year band dipping slightly while the 6-12 month and 1-2 year bands have thickened.
That pattern usually appears when very old coins are spent once and then settle into newer wallets. A slice of the ancient layer is chipped off and recast as fresh ownership without necessarily going straight to exchanges.
High-profile cases fit in here:
The Satoshi-era clusters that moved tens of thousands of BTC after more than a decade of silence sit on top of a steady rise in reactivated seven-to-10-year-old coins.
Various “sleeping beauty” wallets from 2011 to 2013, each with 1,000-10,000 BTC, have lit up in dashboards across 2024 and 2025, which reinforces the sense of an awakening of early cycle supply rather than a single isolated incident.
Crucially, the movement of dormant coins does not automatically indicate selling activity. Firms that specialize in address tagging can often identify exchange wallets, crypto exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and over-the-counter (OTC) desks. In several headline cases, dormant coins moved into other self-custody addresses, multisig structures or internal restructuring targets with no immediate spike in exchange inflows linked to those specific transactions.
In others, movement coincided with legal disputes, tax events or corporate actions, which suggests custody reshuffles rather than short-term trading.
A cautious interpretation of these patterns is:
A record large base of long-term holders built up through past cycles
A visible but controlled drawdown of that base
A gradual redistribution of extremely old coins into newer hands.
This combination is what analysts describe as a whale awakening, a period in which historical supply moves gradually and can be observed in real time onchain.
Why whales might be moving now
Onchain data cannot read minds, but it can show where whale behavior aligns with clear incentives and pressures. Several explanations are consistent with the evidence and analyst research.
Profit-taking into deep liquidity
Glassnode and others have shown that long-term holder supply often peaks into or just before new all-time highs, then enters a distribution phase. At those points, 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 sit on very large unrealized gains.
For early adopters who have held for seven to 10 years, even modest sales would represent significant historical gains for long-term holders without exiting Bitcoin entirely.
Portfolio and venue rebalancing
Some dormant coins have been traced into institutional custody, multisig setups or ETF custodians, which marks a move from personal cold storage to regulated vehicles. Cross-chain flow trackers have also spotted old BTC moving alongside new positions in ETH or other major assets, which suggests internal reallocations rather than full exits.
Legal and administrative triggers
Tax events, lawsuits, inheritance planning and corporate restructurings can all force coins that have been untouched for a decade into motion. It is not uncommon for whale moves to coincide with public legal disputes or regulatory actions, which shows how court orders and compliance obligations can wake sleeping balances even when the investment thesis is unchanged.
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 truly lost, while others belong to individuals, companies or estates.
Over time, more of those holders reach moments of rebalancing, succession or custody upgrades, which naturally produces more awakenings per year even if they still represent a small share of total supply.
Remember, none of these factors excludes the others, and none can be proven from the ledger alone. Onchain data can show which coins moved and where they went, but it cannot reveal why the transaction happened.
Did you know? As of mid-2025, credible onchain estimates suggest 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 everyday users should read the whale awakening
For most people, whale metrics are best treated as transparency and context tools.
When you see a headline about whales dumping, contextual questions observers often consider include:
Are coins flowing to exchange wallets, ETFs, OTC desks or mainly into new self-custody and multisig addresses?
Does the move fit a broader trend in long-term holder supply, illiquid supply and age bands, or is it a one-off outlier?
Are metrics like CDD, age consumed, spent output profit ration and MVRV flashing a regime change or simply reacting to a short burst of old coins moving?
It also helps to remember the limits of attribution:
Labels such as “exchange,” “ETF,” “government” or “whale” rely on heuristics and clustering. Different analytics firms may classify the same entity differently, and some large holders remain unlabeled.
Any narrative about 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 what a particular holder intends next or guarantee that past patterns of dormancy and reactivation will repeat. Building a basic literacy in onchain concepts and combining that with independent research, a clear view of personal risk tolerance and professional advice where appropriate is a more reliable approach than trying to guess why large holders move coins.
