Whale Awakening: Why Dormant Crypto Giants Are Suddenly Back In Motion

In July 2025, analysts watched eight Satoshi-era wallets, each holding 10,000 BTC, move their coins for the first time in 14 years.

In total, 80,000 Bitcoin (BTC) (about $8.6 billion at the time) shifted out of long-dormant addresses in a single clustered episode of movement observed onchain. Blockchain sleuths traced these coins back to 2011, when they were acquired for under $210,000 in total, implying a return of nearly 4,000,000%.

Two separate wallets, each with 10,000 BTC and inactive since 2011, were also reactivated in July 2025. With Bitcoin around $108,000, each address suddenly controlled more than $1 billion.

Data from Lookonchain and Whale Alert indicates that over 62,800 BTC exited wallets older than seven years in early to mid-2025, more than double the amount in the same period in 2024, as highlighted by MarketWatch.

Indeed, the whale awakening is a period in which very old coins start to move, long-term holder balances ease down from record highs, and the typical whale profile changes.

For everyday users, this presents questions: Who actually holds Bitcoin, how concentrated is that ownership, and how do dormant balances interact with liquidity conditions when they move?

Did you know? One recent analysis found that just 83 wallets hold about 11.2% of all BTC supply and that the top four wallets alone control around 3.23%.

Bitcoin’s design makes dormancy visible. Every coin sits in a UTXO, or unspent transaction output, with a timestamp of when it last moved, turning the ledger into a time series of coin “ages.”

A core tool here is HODL Waves. Introduced by Dhruv Bansal at Unchained Capital and later formalized by Glassnode, HODL Waves groups all coins into age bands (for example, 1 day-1 week, 1-3 months, 1-2 years and 5+ years). It shows how thick each band is over time, like geological layers that illustrate patterns in holding and spending activity.

“Coin days destroyed” (CDD) and related measures used by CryptoQuant, Bitbo and others multiply the number of coins moved by how long they were dormant, which gives extra weight to very old coins.

Source: CoinTelegraph