Definition. Realized Cap by Age decomposes Realized Capitalization, the total value of a digital asset valued at the price each unit last moved (equivalent to the cumulative acquisition cost of all circulating coins), into holding-period age cohorts. Each cohort carries the cost-basis stock attributable to coins of that vintage, spanning from hot supply (coins that recently moved) to cold supply (older, dormant coins). Realized Cap HODL Waves is a related, normalized metric.

Technical. Breakdowns use an address-based approach, analyzing transactions and holdings at the wallet-address level to facilitate comparability across digital assets and consistent analysis across blockchain architectures. This contrasts with the UTXO-based approach available for chains like Bitcoin, where unspent transaction outputs are analyzed to categorize asset properties. Cross-method comparisons may show small deviations. Coin age is the time since an address's balance-weighted average acquisition time, so each address contributes its full balance to a single age band. For ETH tokens, burn addresses are excluded.

Interpretation. Per-cohort share of total Realized Cap is the dominant read. Surfaces the distribution of network wealth (cost basis) across hot-to-cold age cohorts. Answers questions of the form: is the majority of the acquisition cost concentrated in older or newer coins?