Supply Held By Exchanges

Coins on exchanges are sellable inventory; coins withdrawn to self-custody are, statistically, being shelved. The multi-year decline in exchange balances since 2020 is one of the strongest structural bull arguments on-chain analysts cite.

Caveats matter here: this counts only exchanges Coin Metrics identifies (coverage grows over time, inflating early-history comparisons), and custody arrangements (ETFs!) blur the self-custody signal. Directional trends over months are meaningful; day wiggles are not.