Understanding Who’s Behind the Market Moves

The goal is to classify token supply based on the behavior of market participants. The idea is simple but powerful: instead of just looking at supply levels, we look at who is buying and who is selling. Is it mostly first-time buyers entering the market? Are we seeing conviction buyers step in while the price drops? Or is the current activity driven by momentum buyers, profit takers, or loss sellers?

Cohort Definitions

To make this work, we created a set of behavior-based cohorts:

• Conviction Buyers: Investors who buy despite falling prices. They believe in the long-term and lower their cost basis.
• Momentum Buyers: Investors who buy during uptrends, typically increasing their average cost basis.
• First Buy: First-time buyers entering the market — a clean slate.
• Loss Sellers: Investors exiting at a loss.
• Profit Takers: Investors locking in gains.

The metric tracks the cumulative token supply held by each cohort over time. To focus solely on investor behavior, we exclude exchanges and smart contracts.

For Bitcoin, this analysis is conducted at the entity level rather than the address level, grouping addresses that belong to the same user.

This is the Point-in-Time (PiT) variant of Supply by Investor Behavior. PiT metrics are strictly append-only and their history is immutable. The historic data does not necessarily reflect the best current knowledge, but the information at the time when a data point was first computed. PiT metrics are ideal candidates for applications in model backtesting and related quantitative purposes. Read our article on PiT metrics for more information.