The latest IntoTheBlock research found that unspent transaction outputs (UTXOs) are a fantastic indicator of a coin’s buying/selling pressure. Diving deeper into Bitcoin‘s UTXOs revealed that almost 4 million coins have been held for over 5 years, showing that even the most violent price swings didn’t force most investors to run.
A new metrics offers meaningful insight into the behavior of crypto assets
Despite being reliant on cold, hard data, crypto analytics isn’t an exact science. The complexity of the industry, combined with the complexity of most cryptocurrency networks, makes it extremely hard to come up with numbers that can be undisputed. That is why most crypto analysis presents data that isn’t written in stone, but rather an estimate on how the network has been performing at a certain point in time.
But, with metrics like transaction volume, hashrate, and the number of addresses being overused in such analysis, new angles are always needed to assess the performance of a network as complex as Bitcoin is.
Crypto analytics company IntoTheBlock has introduced a new section in its platform solely dedicated to UTXO intelligence. The company said that the often ignored metrics a unique source of information about cryptocurrencies and can be used to estimate holding and spending trends.
Unspent transaction outputs, or UTXOs, can be defined as leftover cryptocurrency change in each transaction. The mechanism, on which Bitcoin, Litecoin, Dash, and many other cryptocurrencies were built on, were created as a solution to double-spending. With every transaction creating a new UTXO, the age of the UTXO indicates the block it was first included on.
Understanding the unique characteristics of buyers and sellers
But, getting a hold of this data was everything but easy. According to the company’s Medium post, statistical and machine learning models need to periodically rescan the entire blockchain datasets in order to extract any meaningful information.
When information manages to be extracted, though, it offers an extremely valuable insight into the state of a cryptocurrency.
IntoTheBlock’s UTXO Age Stream Graph signal provides a time-series analysis of the different UTXO positions over time, which shows how long existing coins have been held for.
A deep dive into Bitcoin showed that almost 4 million BTC have been held for over 5 years. Just under 1 million BTC has been held between 3 and 5 years, while almost 2.5 million tokens haven’t been moved at least since 2018.
When focusing on new UTXOs, IntoTheBlock data shows that the holding trends look closer to the price movements Bitcoin has seen in the past year. The pattern looks consistent even when put against some of the craziest price movements, the company said.
This data goes to show that the majority of Bitcoin holders seem to have resisted the immense selling pressure 2019’s bear market has brought on.
