Well, here’s something you don’t see every day. Or maybe you do, if you’ve been watching Bitcoin long enough. Despite a recent price dip from its peak, the number of Bitcoins being held tightly—and not sold—has actually climbed to a new record. According to the latest figures from Glassnode, the so-called ‘illiquid supply’ has hit 14.3 million BTC. That’s a staggering amount of coins just sitting there, not moving.
In the last month alone, another 20,000 BTC were pulled out of active circulation and essentially put into cold storage. It suggests that a lot of people, from big funds to regular folks, saw that price drop not as a reason to panic, but as a chance to buy more. They’re not flinching.
Where Are All the Coins Going?
When you consider that data from CoinGecko shows roughly 19.9 million BTC in circulation, this unmoved chunk represents a massive 72% of the entire supply. So who’s holding it all? The usual suspects, I suppose. Early adopters, crypto exchanges, those new spot ETFs, and now a growing list of public companies.
And then there are the truly dormant wallets. The ones linked to Satoshi Nakamoto, for instance, are believed to hold over a million coins that haven’t budged since the very beginning. Other old wallets hold hundreds of thousands more. Sure, we occasionally see an ancient wallet wake up and move a fortune, like that 80,000 BTC transfer recently, but those are the exceptions. The vast majority just stay frozen.
The Big Players Are Still Buying
This isn’t just a story about individuals holding, though. The institutional appetite seems, well, pretty strong. Just today, the Japanese firm Metaplanet announced it bought 136 more bitcoins. That brings their treasury holdings to over 20,000 BTC.
But the real story might be Strategy. Led by Michael Saylor, the company is just aggressively accumulating. They snapped up nearly 2,000 BTC today alone, spending over $217 million. They now hold a jaw-dropping 3% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist.
They’re not alone, either. Reports indicate 115 different companies and governments across 29 countries are now heavily stacking Bitcoin. Collectively, they control about 1.5 million coins.
What Does It All Mean?
All this accumulation has a direct effect on the market. The percentage of Bitcoin sitting on centralized exchanges has been falling steadily for a year. There’s simply less available to buy if everyone is hoarding. Less supply, with steady or growing demand, tends to… you know.
As for the price? Bitcoin’s been sort of moving sideways this past week. It’s up a tiny bit in the last day, hovering around $112,000. The trading volume is still enormous, over $33 billion. The general mood seems cautiously positive, but who really knows. The one thing that seems clear is that a lot of people are betting on the long game, and they’re not letting go.
