CryptoQuant Head Reveals: Bitcoin’s ’Record’ LTH Selling Inflated by Exchange Transfers
Hold onto your private keys—the panic over Bitcoin's long-term holder exodus might be overblown.
The Data Behind the Drama
A leading on-chain analytics firm is pushing back against the narrative of mass capitulation. Their head researcher argues that recent spikes in long-term holder selling metrics are being misinterpreted. A significant portion of those flagged transactions? Simple transfers between cold storage and exchange custody wallets—not sales hitting the open market.
Context is King
It's a classic case of on-chain data needing a narrative filter. Whale wallets moving assets for security, staking, or even just reorganizing their holdings can look identical to panic selling on a raw chart. Without that context, the market sees ghosts—and sometimes sells because of them.
The Takeaway
This isn't to say selling isn't happening. But the scale might be far less dramatic than the headlines suggest. In crypto, as in traditional finance, sometimes a wallet move is just a wallet move—not a prophetic signal of the next crash. After all, if every large transfer was a bearish bet, the suits on Wall Street would have shorted themselves into oblivion years ago.
Recent Bitcoin Long-Term Holder Selling Hasn’t Been At True Record Levels
In a new post on X, CryptoQuant head of research, Julio Moreno, has talked about the recent selloff from the Bitcoin long-term holders (LTHs). The LTHs refer to investors who have been holding onto their coins for a period longer than 155 days. Statistically, the longer an investor keeps their tokens dormant, the less likely they are to sell them at any point. As such, the LTHs with their long holding times are considered to include the resolute hands of the market that are unlikely to part with their coins.
That said, there are times when these diamond hands do take to selling. One major such selloff occurred in November of this year, as the chart shared by Moreno shows.
At the height of the bitcoin LTH distribution in November, the 30-day sum of spending hit a record high of 1.55 million BTC. The analyst has pointed out, however, that this figure doesn’t tell the entire story.
The value of the LTH distribution doesn’t exclude sources that don’t correspond to economic transactions. For example, internal wallet moves. It turns out that such transfers skewed the market picture notably this time around. “A significant portion of LTH spending was due to exchange internal transactions,” explained Moreno.
According to CryptoQuant data, at least 0.65 million of the “HODLer selling” actually corresponded to internal wallet shuffling from cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase. Thus, the distribution from the group didn’t quite reach the levels that could be considered as new records.
This wasn’t the first time that internal exchange transactions exaggerated LTH selling. As is visible in the chart, there was a sharp spike in Coinbase’s internal transfers of LTH-aged coins back in December 2018 as well.
While adjusting for internal Coinbase shuffling lessens the scale of the latest diamond hand selloff, it doesn’t quite eliminate it. The monthly LTH spending still hit a notable level of 0.9 million BTC at the peak in November.
The only time in the current cycle that the metric exceeded this mark was in December 2024. In fact, as the chart below displays, this selloff was the fifth highest on record.
The record for the highest amount of Bitcoin LTH selling is still maintained by August 2017, which witnessed 1.4 million BTC in movements from the cohort.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is floating around $93,800, up almost 7% in the last seven days.
