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As Bitcoin Pizza Day turns 15 years old, the on-chain analytics firm Glassnode has revealed how coins from back then are still being moved.
Bitcoin Realized Cap Data Shows Recent Movements From 10+ Years BTC
Bitcoin has managed to achieve a new all-time high (ATH), but it’s not the only thing cryptocurrency community members are celebrating today. Back on May 22nd, 2010, Laszlo Hanyecz exchanged 10,000 BTC for two pizzas, in what was perhaps the first example of the asset being used as a mode of payment in a real-world purchase. Given the significance of this event, the date has come to be celebrated as “Bitcoin Pizza Day.”
The pizzas that Laszlo purchased were worth around $40. Fifteen years on, the same amount of BTC translates to a whopping $1.1 billion. Here’s a chart shared by the analytics firm CryptoQuant that shows how this figure has looked on every Bitcoin Pizza Day in history:
Naturally, no one could have possibly foreseen just how big Bitcoin would eventually become. But even if they did, transactions like these were probably necessary in bringing the asset to where it’s at today. As CryptoQuant says, “It’s a high price, but it’s the price that was paid to turn Bitcoin into a means of payment.”
That said, while many like Laszlo would have actively spent their BTC, some holders didn’t. Whether that’s by accident or a product of willful HODLing is impossible to say for sure, but a chunk of the supply is now aged more than ten years old, meaning the owners of those coins haven’t involved them in a single transaction since then.
The analytics firm Glassnode has shared the data for the Realized Cap share of this specific part of the Bitcoin circulating supply.
Looks like the value of the metric has seen a notable decline recently | Source: Glassnode on X
The Realized Cap basically tells us about the total amount of capital that the Bitcoin investors as a whole have used to purchase their coins. In the chart, the percentage of this metric occupied by the supply aged more than ten years is displayed.
Last year, this value hit a peak at 0.045%. Today, the indicator has come to just 0.033%, following steep drawdowns between December and February, and another since April 20th. Based on the trend, Glassnode notes, “15 years after Laszlo bought pizza for 10,000 $BTC – now worth over $1.1B – some of that era’s coins are still moving.”
Coins that are this old are more likely to have reached that age by being lost than through HODLing conviction, so it’s possible that the old Bitcoin being moved now was just recently rediscovered, either by the original investor or someone else who happened to come across the forgotten wallet keys.
BTC Price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is floating around $111,400, up over 7% in the last seven days.
