Cointime Age Horizons
The share of coin-time already consumed, read separately at three age horizons. Young coins have spent most of the time they have accumulated; coins that have sat for years have spent very little of theirs. The distance between the three horizons measures how deep the holding behaviour actually runs.
What is it?
A coin that stays still accumulates coin-time, at a rate of its quantity multiplied by the duration it does not move. When it moves, it consumes some. This chart reports, for a given age range, the coin-time already consumed by the coins occupying it against the coin-time they created. The result is a share between zero and one hundred percent. Three ranges are drawn separately: six to nine months, two to three years, five to six years. It is the age-resolved version of the activity measure Trinity already publishes at whole-supply level: here, one curve per horizon rather than a single figure.
How to read
The three curves are ordered by construction: the short horizon sits above the medium one, which sits above the long one. That is expected and carries no information in itself. What does carry information is the distance between them and how it evolves. A widening distance describes a market where recent coins are active while old ones stay still. A narrowing distance describes the reverse: old coins starting again to consume the time they had accumulated. Read each curve as a depth of behaviour rather than a quantity: it does not say how many coins moved, but what proportion of the time accumulated by that generation has already been spent.
Key zones
There is no universal threshold, but the order of magnitude of each horizon is stable and serves as a landmark. The short horizon sits in the upper part of the scale, which simply reflects that coins a few months old have spent most of the little time they accumulated. The long horizon sits low, because coins still for years have accumulated a lot of time and spent only a fraction of it. It is deviations from those usual levels, not the levels themselves, that carry the reading.
What to observe
Watch the moves of the long horizon, the most meaningful because the hardest to produce: coins held for years must move in volume to make it progress visibly. Then watch the synchronisation between horizons. A simultaneous rise in all three describes general activity; a rise in the short horizon alone describes agitation confined to recent entrants. Finally watch the periods where the long horizon stalls while price moves sharply: they describe holding that does not react. The price curve used for that reading is the spot price overlay, on by default and removable from the toolbar; the three horizons are shares of coin-time and carry no price information on their own.
Historical context
The plot starts on the day the three ranges were genuinely populated. Before that date, the oldest range contained only coins from the founding era, overwhelmingly dormant, and its measure stayed glued to zero for years: an artefact of the network's youth, not a reading. Over the period covered, all three horizons rose, at very different rates, and the phases of rapid progression in the long horizon coincided with periods of strong revaluation.
Expert notes
Two construction subtleties. First, a coin's membership of a range changes every day: the curves do not follow a fixed cohort ageing, but an age window whose population renews continuously. A rise can therefore come either from real movement or from coins with different behaviour entering the range. Second, a transfer between two wallets of the same holder resets the coin's age and moves it into the young ranges, which introduces permanent background noise, more visible on the short horizon than on the others.
Common mistakes to avoid
First mistake, reading these curves as quantities of coins. They measure a share of accumulated time, not a volume: a horizon at thirty percent does not mean thirty percent of coins moved. Second mistake, expecting a crossing between horizons and reading it as a switch; the ordering is guaranteed by construction, a crossing would be a data anomaly rather than a reading. Third mistake, directly comparing one horizon's level to another's: each relates consumption to accumulation on a very different scale, and only each one's evolution within its own frame is comparable.
Programmatic access
REST API
curl -sS \
'https://api.trinityinsights.io/api/v1/onchain/metrics/cointime-age-horizons/data?timeframe=90d' \
-H 'X-API-Key: $TRINITY_API_KEY'MCP server
{
"tool": "get_chart_value",
"metric_id": "cointime-age-horizons",
"timeframe": "1y"
}Required tier: pro. See the pricing grid for the tier list and the MCP documentation for multi-client configuration.
Related metrics
Institutional disclaimer
Trinity Insights is an educational and analytical tool. The metric above does not constitute investment advice. Trinity Insights is not a Crypto-Asset Service Provider (CASP) registered under MiCA Regulation (EU) 2023/1114. See the full disclaimer.