Bitcoin Defies Expectations: Nears All-Time High as Diamond-Handed HODLers Refuse to Sell
Bitcoin's price action is breaking the script—again. As the king of crypto flirts with its ATH, the usual sell-off hasn't materialized. This isn't your 2021 bull run.
HODLers dig in
Long-term holders are treating Bitcoin like a wartime ration—locked away and untouched. Even with prices testing record highs, on-chain data shows no meaningful movement from veteran wallets. Guess those 'Bitcoin is dead' hot takes aged like milk.
The institutional effect
Wall Street's slow-motion Bitcoin adoption means fewer paper hands in the market. When BlackRock's ETF buys the dip, why would whales sell? Traditional finance still can't decide if crypto is a scam or salvation—but their clients want exposure either way.
History rhymes, doesn't repeat
The 2025 rally lacks the frothy retail mania of previous cycles. No Dogecoin millionaire headlines. No celebrity NFT drops. Just cold, quiet accumulation—and a generation of traders who finally learned patience pays. (Well, most of them—looking at you, leverage junkies.)
As Bitcoin teases new highs, one truth emerges: the market's changed. The weak hands got shaken out. The strong? They're not selling—they're reloading. And the suits? Still trying to short the revolution between golf games.
Bitcoin Liveliness Has Recently Been Trending Down
According to the latest weekly report from Glassnode, there has been a growing HODLing sentiment among the bitcoin investors. There are two indicators that capture this trend: Long-Term Holder Supply and Liveliness.
First, the Long-Term Holder Supply keeps track of the total amount of Bitcoin that’s sitting in the wallets associated with the long-term holders (LTHs), investors who have been holding onto their coins since more than 155 days ago. The traders with a holding time equal or lower than this threshold are termed as the short-term holders (STHs).
Now, here is a chart that shows the trend in the Bitcoin LTH Supply over the last few years:
As displayed in the above graph, the Bitcoin LTH Supply has observed a sharp rise during the last few months, implying the supply controlled by this cohort has blown up.
Something to keep in mind is that this doesn’t indicate that the group is ‘buying.’ Rather, what it signifies is that STHs have been maturing into the cohort by holding past the 155-day mark. In other words, it represents a shift toward HODLing conviction in the sector.
Following the latest continuation of this transition, the LTH Supply has reached a new ATH of 14.7 million BTC. “This underscores that HODLing remains the dominant market behavior amongst investors, with accumulation and maturation flows significantly outweighing distribution pressures,” notes Glassnode.
Interestingly, the 155-day threshold currently lies in late January, meaning that the latest growth in the LTHs has been coming from investors who bought above $100,000 and never got shaken out by the price drawdown that followed.
The second metric of interest, the Liveliness, also showcases a similar shift. This indicator relies on a concept known as ‘coin days.’ A coin day is a quantity that any token present in the circulating supply accumulates after being held for 1 day.
When a token with some number of coin days is moved, its coin days counter resets back to zero and the coin days that it had been carrying are said to be ‘destroyed.’
The Liveliness keeps track of the ratio between the total amount of coin days destroyed over BTC’s history and the total that created over it. Below is a chart that shows the trend in this indicator.
From the graph, it’s apparent that the Liveliness saw an uptrend during both the rallies to the ATH in 2024, meaning that HODLers participated in selling. It’s also visible that the same behavior has been missing from the recent run.
“This further reinforces that HODLing remains the dominant behavior among investors, and that a range expansion in price may be necessary to incentivize renewed spending activity,” says the analytics firm.
BTC Price
Bitcoin broke above $110,000 earlier, but the coin has since seen a minor pullback to $109,700.
