Bitcoin holders who kept their coins untouched for more than five years have doubled their onchain activity since May. CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost puts the group's 90-day average of spent coins at about 1,500 BTC, though the data cannot confirm whether the coins were sold.
Bitcoin holders whose coins had sat dormant for more than five years have doubled their spending activity since May, pushing the group's 90-day moving average of spent outputs to roughly 1,500 BTC. CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost tracked the shift as Bitcoin trades through a tight price range.
At 1,500 BTC, the reading stands about 56% above the 962 BTC recorded on June 24, when the average had fallen below 1,000 BTC for the first time since November 2024. Earlier peaks in May 2024, February 2025 and September 2025 saw daily movements exceed 10,000 BTC, 30,000 BTC and, in one case, 142,000 BTC. According to Darkfost: "OG activity has intensified during this consolidation phase." Bitcoin traded near $79,600, down about 1.8% over 24 hours after swinging between an intraday low of $78,723 and a high of $81,370.
Spent coins do not prove a sale
A spent UTXO simply records that a coin was used as the input for a new transaction, so movement alone does not reveal intent. An owner could be sending coins to an exchange, moving them to a new custodian, consolidating several outputs, or splitting a balance across wallets.
Recent dormant-wallet transfers show the limits of this data. Over ten days in August, six wallets inactive for almost 12 to more than 15 years moved 553.59 BTC worth $40.15 million, with five transfers going to addresses carrying no identified exchange link and one sending 40 BTC to a labeled custody and trading platform. Separately, 28 dormant wallets moved 1,314.41 BTC on Aug. 20, including more than 1,200 BTC from addresses created in 2014.
A firmware flaw adds noise to the data
The Coldcard incident, in which a firmware flaw exposed seed phrases on affected hardware wallet models, is complicating the picture further. In early August, K33 Research found that nearly 890,000 BTC had moved over seven days, the highest seven-day active supply recorded in 2026, even as Bitcoin traded within one of its narrowest 30-day ranges since 2023. Researchers linked the surge partly to Coldcard users migrating funds and to attackers draining vulnerable wallets, and Galaxy Research had confirmed the theft of 1,596 BTC from about 7,300 addresses across three attack waves by Aug. 5.
Seed migrations still consume old coins as inputs, so they can lift spending metrics for wallets that have sat untouched for five years or longer even when the owner keeps control of the funds. Wallet consolidation can produce a similar effect, recording old outputs as spent without changing the owner's total balance beyond the network fee.
Source: crypto.news
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