Even though 2021 appears to be the year of the crypto market experiencing some new highs, the increase in value doesn’t seem to have had any impact on the long-term Bitcoin hodlers. The newbie crypto investors have chosen to reap their hard-earned profits, but the old-timers are still content to let their Bitcoin holdings lie and haven’t been swayed by the increase in its price. This data is highlighted by Unchained Capital through their ‘Hodlewaves’ chart. It is regarded as a metric that’s used for measuring the time since the different Bitcoin wallets had been last active. However, it appears that there has been a significant increase in both short-term and long-term activity in the year 2021.
The Hodlewaves chart indicate that a new high was achieved, only beaten by the metrics of 2018, in terms of movement in Bitcoin throughout the last 30 to 90 days since it was introduced. The total of these type of wallet addresses is around 15% or more and this represents the largest part of Bitcoin wallets. The second-largest segment comprises of all the Bitcoin wallets that have not been in use for the last 3 to 5 years. These wallets make up around 13.5% of the total Bitcoin wallet addresses. During this year, the number of wallets that fall in this category has only gone up.
This means that the total Bitcoin ‘hodler’ traders have actually increased in 2021. Those who have been keeping an eye on this metric have begun to speculate that a majority of these hodlers had purchased Bitcoin back in 2017 when it had reached its peak. Consequently, they had had to suffer the brunt of the crypto winter that came after, and now, they are adamant to enjoy the crypto spring that has come along this year. Moreover, it also appears that the extra-long term holders of Bitcoin, which refer to wallets that have not moved between 5 and 10 years, have now begun to fall in number.
The trend had been seen in the last year, but the same is not applicable for Bitcoin wallets that are more than a decade old. In the last two years, the greatest of Bitcoin Hodlers have gone from 1.7% of the total Bitcoin wallets to around 10.7% of them. One of the most prominent on-chain analytics companies in the crypto space is Glassnode and its CTO and co-founder is Rafael Schultze-Kraft. The man disclosed in a public tweet that the total number of crypto wallets that have been inactive in the last three years has gone up, whereas those who are new to the space are selling their holdings for reaping the rewards.
According to this data, there has been a decline in the total number of Bitcoin wallets that haven’t shown activity in a year, as they have gone from 65% in January to 55% currently. This means that almost half of the whole Bitcoin wallet space is currently operating in this new bull market.