In a significant shift in bitcoin’s market structure, the amount of supply held by “conviction buyers” has risen to nearly 4 million BTC, according to BitGo data cited by Bitfinex on Wednesday.
Bitcoin in the hands of long-term buyers currently represents a 300% increase since the end of 2025, signaling a massive migration of the crypto’s realized value to large, low-active entities, according to Bitfinex.
The massive “conviction” capital is valued at just over $320 billion, based on bitcoin’s current price of around $80,000.
“While the exact methodology behind BitGo’s ‘conviction buyers’ metric is not immediately clear, the broader signal is noteworthy,” said Mati Greenspan, a market analyst and founder of Quantum Economics. “Historically, periods of liquid supply tightening coupled with renewed demand have created the conditions for bitcoin’s most aggressive upside extensions.”
The current accumulation trend marks the largest two-quarter increase in high-conviction buying since the COVID-19 crash of 2020, Bitfinex said. Conviction buyers are long-term investors, whether they are individuals or institutions.
Long-term buyers are not part of the estimated 5.6 million BTC that have been idle for over a decade, according to Jameson Lopp, a core bitcoin developer. The total amount of bitcoin in circulation is currently 20.03 million, according to CoinDesk data.
Bitfinex analysts noted that a growing share of bitcoin’s realized value no longer circulates on crypto exchanges, but instead moves into the hands of entities that rarely trade, regardless of price volatility.
This structural shift suggests that long-term owners, ranging from institutional “whales” to corporate treasurers, are aggressively absorbing the available bitcoin supply, particularly Strategy (MSTR), the largest publicly traded corporate holder of bitcoin. This company, which is currently sitting on $4.6 billion in unrealized gains, recently increased its total holdings to 818,869 BTC, which it acquired for nearly $62 billion. As supply moves into these low-active units, it effectively reduces the liquid supply available on the open market, creating a potential “supply shock” dynamic.
Supporting this narrative of strengthening the market floor, CEX.IO research. Their analysis reveals that nearly 70% of recent buyers’ bids are now in profit, a metric that often serves as a psychological buffer against sell-offs, according to CEX.IO research.
CEX.IO also suggests that as most new bitcoin investors move into the “green”, their urgency to exit positions during smaller pullbacks decreases, helping to stabilize the price of BTC.
“People who actually get bitcoin always want to accumulate as much as possible and never want to sell, especially now with all the new existing ways to borrow against BTC holdings,” Ran Hammer, vice president of business development at Orbs, told CoinDesk. “It completely changes the supply equation, with more BTC structurally removed from the market.”
In a separate email comment to CoinDesk, Connor Howe, CEO and co-founder at Enso, said he believes BTC’s long-term scarcity narrative is maturing from theory to market structure.
“With ETF flows and institutional accumulation becoming more structural than speculative, a greater portion of supply is moving into conviction hands,” he said, adding that “this could make future scarcity far more visible as demand accelerates.”
