Dormancy reads the average age of the Bitcoin being spent, weighted by how much moved. It is the most direct answer this dashboard gives to a simple question: are today’s sellers recent buyers, or people who have held for years?

That answer changes what a day of selling means. Supply arriving from someone who bought last month is a different market event from supply arriving from someone who bought two cycles ago, even when the price prints the same candle. Dormancy separates the two without needing to know who either of them is.

What it actually measures

Every coin that moves carries an age, the time since it last changed hands. Dormancy takes the coins that moved and reports how old they were on average, giving more weight to the ones that moved in size. A high reading means the supply changing hands had been sitting still for a long time. A low reading means it had not.

The measure makes no claim about intent. It observes that old coins moved, which is a fact of the chain, and stops there. What that movement was for, a sale, a custody change, a wallet upgrade, is outside what the number can see.

Why the line can rise without more selling

Dormancy is an average, not a total. It reports how old the coins that moved were and takes no view at all on how many there were, which means the line can climb on a day when almost nothing happened. A thin, quiet session in which a single aged wallet moves will read as elevated, because the small amount that did move was old.

This is the most common misreading of the metric. A rising line describes the composition of spending, not its size. If you want to know whether a lot is being sold, Dormancy is the wrong instrument, and pairing it with a destruction series is what stops the mistake.

What it does not tell you

It cannot separate an economic sale from plumbing. An exchange consolidating old wallets produces exactly the reading a distributing holder produces, because the coins really did move and their age really was destroyed. Nothing in the series flags the difference.

It is also spiky enough on a single day to be close to useless raw. One large ancient output can dominate a session, so the dashboard opens on a smoothed line. Read the smoothed series for behaviour and the raw one for events.

How to read it

Elevated. The reading sits high against its full history, so older coins are on the move. That is the footprint of distribution.

Mid-range. Nothing at either edge. What is on screen is scenery, not an instruction.

Subdued. Down near the bottom of everything on record. Old coins are staying put and recent buyers are doing the trading, which is where accumulation phases have generally lived.

Dormancy updates inside the Dormancy dashboard, alongside ASOL, MSOL and Coin Days Destroyed.

Common questions

Where does this part company with ASOL?

Both read the age of spent coins, and they normalise differently. Dormancy weights by how much moved, ASOL weights by how many outputs moved. They usually agree, and where they part company the gap is telling you something about transaction size.

Does higher volume push it up?

No, by design. Turnover could double and leave this untouched. The question here is the vintage of what moved, never the quantity.

What does a falling line describe?

The supply changing hands is getting younger. Recent buyers are doing the trading while the old coins stay put, which is the everyday state of an accumulation phase rather than anything to be alarmed by.

Can one wallet move it?

Yes, on a single day. A large, very old output carries enough weight to set the print on its own, which is why a sustained shift over weeks is worth far more than any individual session.

Should I read it on its own?

No. It describes who is selling, not how much or to whom. Pair it with a measure of size, such as Coin Days Destroyed, and with price, which supplies the evidence on whether the supply is being absorbed.