Liveliness

How to read it

Liveliness measures the balance between coins being held and coins being spent, across all of history. A rising line means long-dormant supply is waking up and moving. A falling or flat line means accumulation is winning — coins are going still faster than they are being spent.

How it's calculated

Cumulative coin-days destroyed divided by cumulative coin-days created.

What it did in past cycles

Liveliness rose from 0.12 at the start of 2011 to an all-time high of 0.63 on 2025-11-26, and the cycle anchors sit almost on top of each other near the top of that range: 0.47 (2013-12-04), 0.59 (2017-12-16), 0.61 (2021-11-08), 0.62 (2025-10-06).

The bottoms are indistinguishable from the tops. It read 0.60 at the December 2018 low against 0.59 at the December 2017 high — a bear market of 84% moved this number by one hundredth, in the wrong direction.

What it does record honestly is the long arc: an increasing share of all coin-days ever created has now been destroyed, which is what you would expect as early holders gradually distribute into a growing market. The flattening since 2017 says that process has largely run its course.

What it doesn't tell you

Because both terms are cumulative, the metric moves slowly and recent behaviour is diluted by a decade of history. It cannot distinguish selling from custody changes, and lost coins keep accruing coin-days forever, quietly depressing the ratio.

Its record makes the practical limitation plain: over four cycles this line has gone up and stayed up. It is a ratchet, not an oscillator, and its cycle-anchor readings carry almost no information.

What it is genuinely useful for is the question it was built to answer over long horizons: is Bitcoin's supply becoming more concentrated in dormant hands, or less? A falling Liveliness over years would be strong evidence of a structural shift toward holding. The flattening since 2017 says the answer is currently neither — the balance between coin-days created and destroyed has been roughly stable for the better part of a decade.

Reading it with other metrics

For anything cycle-timed, use the VDD Multiple instead — same underlying coin-age data, normalised so it actually oscillates.

Long-term-holder supply answers the question people usually want from Liveliness — is supply concentrating into patient hands right now? — on a timescale short enough to be actionable.