1 in 6 Bitcoins Has Been Dormant for Over 10 Years: New Record of 3.56 Million BTC Untraceable

Twenty years of slumber, a world transformed upon awakening. The share of Bitcoin supply considered lost has just crossed a new threshold. According to CryptoQuant analyst Darkfost, 3.56 million BTC have not moved on-chain for over ten years, representing about 17.7% of the circulating supply. One in six, in sum, lies dormant in the oldest age category tracked by the on-chain analysis platform. But sleeping for ten years does not mean they have disappeared for good.

Key points of this article:

• The share of bitcoins considered lost has reached a historic threshold of 3.56 million BTC, representing 17.7% of the circulating supply.
• This figure is based on inactivity of over ten years, but this immobility does not necessarily imply the permanent loss of private keys.

The figure comes directly from Darkfost, a regular contributor to CryptoQuant on X, in a post published on August 16:

The share of the supply considered lost has just reached a record, standing at 3.56 million BTC, or about 17.7% of the circulating supply.
In this chart, I simply examined the BTC that has not moved for over 10 years.
Rare events can occasionally bring some BTC back to life, as was the case in July 2025, but overall, we see that the lost supply continues to grow.
In the last 30 days, more than 14,000 Bitcoins have been added to this dormant share of the supply.
This dynamic naturally reduces the circulating supply of Bitcoin.

In short, the share of the supply deemed lost has just reached a record of 3.56 million BTC (17.7% of the circulating supply), and an additional 14,000 bitcoins have joined this group in just the past month. The method relies on CryptoQuant's UTXO Age Bands, which classify each UTXO (an unspent transaction output, the basic unit of Bitcoin's ledger) according to its age, from less than a day to over ten years.

Ten years of silence do not prove that a private key has disappeared.
Here lies the trap of the word "lost". CryptoQuant considers ten years of inactivity as an approximation, not as certainty. A blockchain records movements, never their reasons. It does not say whether a holder has lost their recovery phrase, whether they have died without leaving instructions, or whether they are knowingly holding their coins since 2014 without ever touching them.
Ten years of immobility prove one thing: inactivity. Nothing more. Some of these wallets likely belong to early miners who have disappeared along with their keys. Others are simply held by patient investors who have never lost anything at all.

A nuance also matters in the 14,000 BTC added this month. A coin does not become dormant all at once: it mechanically shifts into the "10 years and older" category as soon as the decade passes since its last transaction. Coins that have remained unmoved since August 2016, for example, simply cross this ten-year threshold this month. Thus, the increase in stock partly reflects the clock, not just new losses. And the reverse also happens: Darkfost himself cites July 2025, when very old coins suddenly came back to life on-chain, proof that the "lost" stock can also decrease, not just grow.
A circulating supply that never appears for sale on an exchange behaves, for the market, as a rarer supply than it is officially. However, rarity alone never drives up a price. A price is set at the margin, between buyers and sellers who are actually active, not based on a theoretical stock that lies dormant in a corner. History has already contradicted the thesis of permanent loss. In July 2025, 80,000 BTC dormant for fourteen years suddenly woke up, the most spectacular proof that no coin leaves circulation as long as its private key still exists somewhere.

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