Dormant Bitcoin activity dropped in the second quarter. It fell to its lowest level since the third quarter of 2022. The figures were shared by Alex Thorn, head of firmwide research at Galaxy Digital, in a post on X.
The reawakening of old coins has historically coincided with profit-taking by Bitcoin’s longest-term holders.
Dormant Bitcoin awakenings slow after two-year sell-off
Dormant coin movement is when Bitcoin sits still for years, then moves again. It’s closely watched by analysts, and activity from long-held wallets has often coincided with selling. Quiet wallets indicate holders are holding tight.
“OGs taking profit,” Thorn said, comparing the pattern to Bitcoin’s 2017 bull run. Most of the Bitcoin veterans who wanted to sell into 2024 and 2025 strength, in his reading, are done. That’s one less local selling pressure on the market. Coin days destroyed tells a similar tale. That metric, which measures spending weighted by how long coins were sitting idle, also fell in Q2.
Thorn called the two-year period “a great distribution” in mid-July. He wrote that 2024 and 2025 moved as much long-dormant Bitcoin onchain as the entire 2017 rally, and nothing in between came close. And he pegged the pace for 2026 to be less than half of last year’s dormant coin reactivations.
Galaxy’s charts go back to 2016. They show a repeating cycle, with old coins waking up during the rallies of 2017, 2021, and again across 2024 and 2025. Holders of coins aged 1 to 10 years moved large amounts, mostly to sell. The distribution peaked at the end of 2025, with coins aged between one and two years representing about 900,000 BTC moved in one month. This year, that flow dried up.
Q2 dormant coin awakening volume was the lowest since Q3 2022 and down substantially from the elevated levels of 2024 and 2025 pic.twitter.com/thrC9K6Gdx
— Alex Thorn (@intangiblecoins) July 25, 2026
Bitcoin hovers near $65,000 as whale selling eases
Bitcoin’s cooling comes after a steep drop. The token reached an all-time high of over $126,000 in October 2025. It then fell to around 48% to trade around $65,265 by mid-July. And it’s trading at $64,808.55 at the time of writing.
But Thorn pushed back against one theory circulating online. “We are not seeing whales selling on quantum computing risk,” he said. Galaxy works with a large pool of institutional investors, and not one cited quantum risk as a reason to close a position, Thorn said. Quantum fear more often discourages outside buyers than it encourages existing holders to sell, he said.
The big holders had been visibly selling for months before the slowdown. On July 3, Cryptopolitan reported that several whale wallets, including one belonging to venture capitalist Tim Draper and other wallets containing mining-firm reserves, were moving coins to exchanges. Bitcoin was trading at about $57,950 at the time, a 21-month low.
