Nearly 35% of Circulating BTC Supply was Bought in Last 3 Months

Bitcoin’s price has increased steadily within that past few months. But as anyone who has  just entered the space even at around $40,000 would know, twenty to fifty percent swings could happen within a week, and sometimes even happen overnight (just think back to March 12, 2020).

On chain analyst Willy Woo chimed in Thursday, March, 11th on Twitter saying, 

35% of the available #Bitcoin supply was bought in the last 3 months. 5% of that available supply was bought at prices above $1T market cap.

– Data derived from @glassnode‘s URPD metric.

– Available bitcoin supply: 15m BTC (current supply excluding estimated lost coins by @chainalysis)

First, it is important to note that Woo is using an estimate of the amount of Bitcoin (fifteen million) that is accessible from Chainalysis. This means of the 18,652,943  Bitcoin mined, as of the time of writing this only fifteen million are able to be accessed by their owners. Those that are believed to be lost / unrecoverable have been ignored in this calculation.

Second, Woo uses information from Glass Node’s URPD which is short for “UTXO Realized Price Distribution” (UTXO being Unspent Transaction Output). This refers to the actual digital currency that is spendable after a transaction is finished.

What is URPD?

According to Glass Node’s Academy URPD, 

“shows at which prices the current set of Bitcoin UTXOs were created (i.e. each bar shows the amount of existing bitcoins that last moved within that specified price bucket).”

In other words the analyst is able to observe from which pricepoint Bitcoin has moved. Looking at this data, Woo was able to deduce that just above a third of all Bitcoin (something just above five million) was purchased in the past three months. He further deduced that 5% of this was bought just above the one trillion market cap.

Given this number of purchasing and holding at these prices, there is reason to suspect there was some institutional spending. In fact, Michael Saylor of MicroStrategy recently tweeted,

“MicroStrategy has purchased an additional ~262 bitcoins for ~$15.0 million in cash at an average price of ~$57,146 per #bitcoin. As of 3/12/2021, we #hodl ~91,326 bitcoins acquired for ~$2.211 billion at an average price of ~$24,214 per bitcoin. $MSTR“

MicroStrategy’s confidence in their decision sparks the question where the top may be for this market cycle. If institutional money is still comfortable investing are we only half or part way? Given Saylor’s latest statement we may expect some more room as the price heads toward $100,000.

That said, if we take glass node’s URPD as an indicator pointed out by Willy Woo, we may expect sizable support around the $56,000 level. Much like the support displayed at the price point of $45,000.

Like other metrics that seem to point towards growth, URPD is best used along with other on chain analysis indicators and chart analysis. Included in this purchase of 35% of circulating supply may be a sizable amount of new retail crypto. As Bitcoin continues to enter price exploration and the narratives from talking heads change, it is also clear that Bitcoin is growing in adoption and stature as well.

Where does Bitcoin go from here? Let us know in the comments below.