UTXO data offers a window into Bitcoin ownership
Dhruv Bansal, co-founder of Unchained Capital, published the first part of a research series titled Bitcoin Data Science: Hodl Waves, examining how Bitcoin moves and settles across multi-year market cycles. The study is built on Bitcoin’s unspent transaction output (UTXO) model, which allows researchers to identify when a coin was last moved because every output carries a timestamped history on the blockchain.
Using that dataset, Unchained Capital created a color-coded chart showing the age distribution of Bitcoin’s UTXOs from the genesis block in 2009 onward. The warmer bands at the bottom represent younger coins — such as less than 1 day, 1 day to 1 week, and 1 week to 1 month — and tend to expand when large amounts of BTC suddenly change hands. Cooler bands near the top capture older holdings, including coins untouched for 2–3 years, 3–5 years, and more than 5 years, revealing the buildup of dormant supply between rallies.
What the “Hodl Waves” pattern shows
According to the research, each major bull run is followed by a distinct “Hodl Wave”. In practical terms, a rally causes a large share of BTC to be spent and transferred to new owners. As trading activity fades, those newly acquired coins begin to age in place, gradually forming layered wave-like curves on the chart. Bansal said this nested pattern reflects each age band suddenly becoming thicker at progressively later points in time after a rally, offering a visual map of investor behavior through boom-and-bust cycles.
The firm argues that this kind of chart is unique to public blockchains. Traditional asset classes generally do not provide a complete, historical, timestamped record of every unit’s movement. Bitcoin does, which makes it possible to perform post-hoc analysis of large-scale market behavior and identify how ownership structures evolve over time.
From the genesis era to the 2017 surge
Unchained traces the first major wave to the genesis period from January 2009 to June 2011, when Bitcoin traded roughly between $0 and $33. The study says this was not a rally-driven wave, but rather a consequence of Bitcoin having little monetary value at the time. Early adopters, including Satoshi-era participants, largely held on to their coins because there was limited reason to spend them.
The next important phase ran from the June 2011 peak near $33 to the December 2013 rally around $1,000. Right after Bitcoin reached $1,000, more than 60% of BTC had moved within the prior 12 months, making it one of the youngest moments in the history of Bitcoin’s money supply. In other words, older coins were heavily redistributed during the rally.
The largest Hodl Wave identified in the study stretched from the 2013 move to $1,000 through the December 2017 spike above $19,000. At the start of 2017, nearly 60% of all BTC was older than 12 months; by the market top, that figure had fallen to 40%. The company said roughly 20% of all existing bitcoin was transacted for the first time in years during 2017. Researchers linked that shift to several possible drivers, including the Bitcoin Cash hard fork, the SegWit upgrade, the ICO boom, and profit-taking.
A new cohort of long-term holders emerges
After the late-2017 rally and the following crypto winter, the study said a new wave was already taking shape. The share of Bitcoin older than 12 months had dropped to 40%, indicating that a large amount of supply had recently been reactivated. At the same time, beginning in January 2018, the proportion of Bitcoin aged 6 to 12 months rose from 7.76% to 14.63%, effectively doubling.
Bansal’s conclusion is that every major rally in Bitcoin has historically been followed by a major period of renewed holding. In his view, on-chain data was already showing the formation of another generation of investors settling in for the long term. For market observers, the Hodl Waves framework offers a useful way to understand how supply ages, how ownership rotates, and how conviction can rebuild after volatility fades.