In 2025, long-inactive bitcoin addresses proved far more active than in previous periods: a total of 123,852.58 BTC was moved on-chain, equivalent to over $11 billion. Throughout the year, Btcparser recorded the activation of 1,047 such wallets, though the volume distribution was highly uneven due to a major spike in July.
Overview of Old Bitcoin Wallet Activation in 2025
Data from Btcparser shows that in 2025, long-term inactive addresses created in Bitcoin's early years returned to circulation in significant volumes. Altogether, these addresses spent 123,852.58 BTC, with monthly activity varying: most months showed moderate volumes, but the annual total was skewed by one large series of transactions.
July Activity Spike
The key event was July, when 83,865.75 BTC were moved in a single month—substantially more than the average for other months. This wave began with a small group of wallets created in 2011 that transferred over 80,000 BTC; it is known that one party worked with Galaxy Digital to sell part of these assets.
Monthly Activity Breakdown
Aside from the July spike, monthly figures varied: some months recorded relatively modest sums and numbers of reactivations, while August saw the highest number of awakened addresses for the year. Below is a selection of major values broken down by month.
- January: 3,412.52 BTC
- February: 1,549.41 BTC
- July: 83,865.75 BTC
- December: 3,607.62 BTC (including two Casascius coins totaling exactly 2,000 BTC)
Impact of Old Wallets on the Market
The distribution of reactivations was concentrated: the majority of moved funds came from early Bitcoin-era addresses, highlighting the influence of early adopters on on-chain metrics. Such large transfers distort monthly metrics and emphasize that long-term dormant supply can still significantly shift statistics when it returns to circulation.
Why This Matters
If you mine Bitcoin, these events are useful to consider as factors affecting on-chain activity and liquidity, even if they don’t directly change your hardware operations. Large transfers from long-held reserves can temporarily skew turnover and market attention metrics, which is important to keep in mind when evaluating short-term charts and indicators.
Moreover, the fact that early wallets remain controlled and occasionally activated shows that a significant portion of supply is still concentrated in relatively few addresses. This is an important contextual element when reading reports and monitoring large movements, such as in the case of the sleeping bitcoin miner who suddenly moved their funds.
What to Do?
Practical steps for miners with 1–1000 devices in Russia—brief and to the point. First, monitor on-chain alerts and services that track large transfers and old wallet activity; this helps understand when the market receives sudden liquidity. Second, when planning sales or strategy changes, consider that isolated large transactions can distort short-term signals, so rely on longer data windows.
- Enable alerts for large transfers and monitor on-chain aggregators.
- Don’t make decisions based on a single trading day—look at weekly and monthly trends.
- Keep wallet backups and verify counterparties and platforms for large operations.
If you’re interested in comparable cases of large transfers and holder behavior, it’s useful to review materials on transfers to Coinbase and an overview of holder behavior, which help put such events into context.