HODL Waves

Every coin on-chain has an "age" — the time since it last moved. HODL Waves buckets the entire circulating supply into age bands (commonly under 1 day, 1 day–1 week, 1 week–1 month, and so on up past 10 years), then stacks the percentage of supply in each band into a single chart over time. As coins age without moving, they migrate from younger bands into older ones; when they finally transact, they reset back to the youngest band.

Imagine that at the start of a bear market 30% of supply sits in the "1+ year" bands. If price grinds sideways for eighteen months and those coins don't move, that share swells — say to 45% — as more and more of the supply crosses the one-year mark untouched. That rising old-band share is the signature of accumulation: fewer coins available to trade, held through the drawdown. When a new bull market later lifts price and that 45% starts falling as old coins wake up and move, it signals long-term holders beginning to distribute into strength.

A thickening of the oldest bands (1+ year, and especially 3+ years) signals growing long-term conviction — more of the supply is sitting untouched through drawdowns and rallies alike, which mechanically shrinks the liquid float available to trade.

A sudden thickening of the youngest bands, especially after a long period of dormancy in the older ones, indicates old coins are moving — historically associated with long-term holders distributing into strength near cycle tops, since that's when the incentive to finally sell a long-held position is highest.

HODL Waves are a slow, structural read— you watch the trend in the old bands over months, not the daily wiggle. Because they describe supply behavior and say nothing about demand or price, they're most useful as confirmation: rising long-term-holder supply through a bear market corroborates a bottoming thesis that a valuation metric like MVRV Z-Score or a flow metric like exchange netflow is also pointing to.

Supply-age distribution is one of the on-chain datasets behind Alphabit's On-Chain Analytics. It informs the holder-behavior view of the market rather than feeding a single threshold — the point is the shape of the supply over time, read alongside the valuation and momentum families the Risk Model scores.

A coin moving on-chain doesn't necessarily mean it's being sold — it could be an internal transfer, a move to a new wallet format, or custodial reshuffling, all of which reset the "age" clock without any change in ownership or intent. HODL Waves are also a supply-side signal only; they say nothing about price or demand, which is why they're typically read alongside a valuation metric like MVRV rather than on their own.