Key Takeaways
What evidence shows that the old Bitcoin is reawakening?
In both 2024 and 2025, more than 250,000 BTC that had been dormant for over seven years were removed from their wallets.
Why are we seeing this increased movement now?
Breaking the psychological level of $100,000 could have led to a profit-taking mentality among early holders. Movement for security reasons was also likely.
In a CryptoQuant Insights post, analyst OpChainSchool saw that 2025 has already surpassed a key benchmark set in 2024. The movement of Bitcoin [BTC]which had been inactive for more than seven years, amounted to 255,000 BTC in 2024.
In October 2025, this number was already 270,000 BTC. It also marked an all-time high for currency movements, which had been dormant for so long.
It showed that more and more early era coins were waking up. Portfolios from the awakening Satoshi era are nothing new and usually spark speculation that early holders were selling. Sometimes they turn out to be internal reorganizations.
Individual awakenings have little impact on Bitcoin’s price trends or prospects.
What stories does the once dormant Bitcoin movement tell?
The analyst pointed out that there could be three reasons why the dormant Bitcoin was awakening. It could come from old miners gaining access to their reserves, but it could also come from security migrations to new wallets.
The third reason might be the most compelling. With prices above the psychological level of $100,000, more and more long-term holders were likely liquidating their holdings.
Source: CryptoQuant
The $100,000 level has been seen as a critical threshold for years, just as a $1 million or even $10 million Bitcoin now appears before us. Over the past year, long-term holders (2 or more years) have seen greater token movement.
In particular, the 3- to 5-year holding cohort has shown more consistent sales since early 2024 than previous years’ figures dating back to 2021. This showed that holders’ profit-taking behavior has a cyclical component.
Another factor to take into account was the declining profit ratio of output issued by holders in the long run. The 14-day simple moving average of the LTH SOPR stood at 4.08 in mid-July. At the time, BTC reached the $120,000 mark for the first time, and the sell-off there was driven by holders with extreme profits.
In three months this value has fallen to 1.7. This meant that holders have sold their tokens for a profit over the past three months, but the size of the profit has decreased.
In 2025, the movement of 270,000 dormant Bitcoins meant a surge in market supply.
The LTH SOPR indicated that investors were willing to sell at a profit despite shrinking margins over the past three months.
Amid this selling pressure, Bitcoin bulls held firm at the $100,000 level. The weekly swing low reached $98,200, but the overall weekly structure remains bullish for now.