ASOL (Average Spent Output Lifespan) asks how old the coins packed inside each moving output were, which settles whether young or seasoned supply is doing the trading. A climbing line says the patient money has started letting go.

The word to hold on to is output. ASOL counts per output rather than per coin, and that single choice separates it from every other age measure on this dashboard. It is the source of both its sensitivity and its most common misreading.

What it actually measures

When an output is spent, the age it had accumulated is released. ASOL takes those ages across everything spent in a session and reports the average, treating each output as one observation. The result is a lifespan, read in coin days per output, describing the typical vintage of what moved.

Read as a trend, it maps the behaviour of the market’s patient supply. Long stretches of low readings describe a market in which only recent coins are trading. Rising readings describe older cohorts joining in, which historically has come later in an advance rather than at its start.

One output is one vote, whatever its size

Because the average is taken across outputs rather than across coins, a dust-sized output and a very large one count the same. This is what makes the metric so responsive to a single ancient movement, and it is also what makes it vulnerable to activity that has nothing to do with markets.

Wallet consolidation is the clearest example. An exchange sweeping many old outputs into one address changes the reading substantially while no coin changes owner. Batching does the same in reverse. Before treating a move as behavioural, check whether the output count itself changed.

MSOL: the signal is the gap, not the level

The metric reports the typical spent lifespan, not the average one. Where an average absorbs every extreme in full, a median asks only which observation sits in the middle, so an outlier can be arbitrarily large and still shift the answer by very little.

MSOL is one of the few series on this dashboard that is more useful in relation to another line than on its own. A rise in ASOL that MSOL does not follow was one large old movement. A rise in MSOL that ASOL does not match is broader and quieter, a lot of ordinary holders spending older coins, and this is the more meaningful of the two.

That inversion catches people out. The dramatic-looking series is usually the less informative one, because drama in an average is what a single large holder produces. Reading MSOL first and ASOL second is the more reliable order.

What it does not tell you

A single day is close to unusable. One very old, very large movement can dominate a session entirely, which is one reason the median variant exists beside it. If ASOL has spiked and MSOL has not, the spike was one event rather than a change in how the market is behaving.

It also carries no direction. Old coins moving during capitulation and old coins moving during profit-taking produce the same reading, and the metric offers no way to tell them apart. Price and the profit condition of the market have to supply that.

How to read it

Elevated. Output lifespans are long against their full history, so older coins are among those moving. Historically the distribution side.

Mid-range. Lifespans sit inside their usual range, describing ordinary turnover rather than a signal.

Subdued. Lifespans are short against their full history, so the coins moving are young and aged supply is staying put.

The Dormancy dashboard carries ASOL together with MSOL, Dormancy and Coin Days Destroyed.

Common questions

What causes a large spike?

A single very old, very large movement. The average runs across outputs, so one ancient output can set the print for the whole day.

How does it differ from Dormancy?

Each asks how old the supply changing hands was. This one treats every output as equally important; Dormancy tilts towards whichever outputs carried the most. When the pair fall out, the gap between them is a statement about transaction size.

Can one wallet move the reading?

Easily. It is useful when hunting for awakenings and misleading when reading a trend, which is exactly why the median version sits alongside it.

Does a rising reading mean selling?

It means older coins are moving. Custody plumbing destroys the same lifespan as a genuine sale, because the coins really did move even though nobody changed owner.

How should it be paired?

With MSOL for confirmation and with a destruction series for scale. ASOL says how old, and it never says how much.

Why does it move more slowly than ASOL?

Because the middle of a distribution will not be hauled about by one huge output. It budges only when a great many outputs have aged, which makes movement here count for far more than the same movement in its neighbour.

What does it mean when MSOL rises and ASOL does not?

That the change is widespread rather than concentrated. Plenty of unremarkable owners are letting go of older coins, and that carries considerably more weight than one big address stirring.