Coin Days Destroyed

Data to 2026-09-17. On-chain metrics are fetched on a rotation, so this can trail the build by a few days.

How to read it

Coin Days Destroyed weights movement by how long coins sat still. One coin held ten years and then spent destroys far more coin-days than a hundred coins traded daily. Spikes mean genuinely old supply is moving — the strongest available signal that long-dormant holders are acting.

How it's calculated

For every spent output, multiply the number of coins by the days since they last moved, then sum across the day.

What it did in past cycles

Unlike almost everything else on this site, CDD has no cycle shape. Its largest single day in the entire record, 5.18 × 10⁸ coin-days on 2024-05-28, falls in the middle of a cycle rather than at a top or a bottom. Its quietest, 5.67 × 10⁴ on 2024-07-06, is five weeks later.

Readings at the cycle anchors are unremarkable by comparison and do not order themselves: 6.7 × 10⁶ (2013-12-04), 1.11 × 10⁷ (2017-12-16), 1.68 × 10⁷ (2021-11-08), 1.45 × 10⁷ (2025-10-06). The January 2015 bottom registered a higher reading than the December 2013 top.

That is the honest finding: single-day CDD is dominated by individual large movements — a custodian rotating cold storage, an estate settling, an exchange consolidating — and those events are not distributed according to the market cycle. The cumulative and normalised versions are where the signal lives.

What it doesn't tell you

Movement is not selling. Exchange migrations, custody changes, wallet upgrades and estate transfers all destroy coin-days without a single coin being sold. Large one-off events can dominate a day's reading entirely.

The record below is what that caveat looks like in practice, and it is why this chart is better used to prompt a question — what moved that day? — than to answer one.

Reading it with other metrics

The VDD Multiple is this series normalised against its own trend, which is the version to use if you want a comparable reading across eras. Liveliness is the cumulative version, which strips out the single-day noise entirely at the cost of moving very slowly.

When old coins genuinely move in size, it should show up in long-term-holder supply as well. If CDD spikes and LTH supply does not fall, the movement was probably custody rather than distribution.