How BlockShield bands Bitcoin holders, why the whale headline is our mapping of a provider's bands, and why the ten-year reference cohort is a frozen extract.
The holder structure of the whole Bitcoin chain, banded by balance size: how many addresses sit in each band and how much BTC they hold between them.
The headline whale figure is the sum of the provider's top two bands. That mapping is ours, and the card says so, because the band thresholds were not reachable inside the provider's free rate limit and an unverified boundary would be an invented definition.
One request a day re-reads the provider's whole retained window, nine bands deep, and our own snapshots accumulate past its far edge. The founding assumption that the provider served today only was ours, not theirs — it cost real history and was corrected by probing the source.
The rolling 30-day change is the one definition of it, and it unlocks only at 31 real snapshots. It is never a rate extrapolated from two points, and the headline change is the last point of that rolling series rather than a second computation that could drift from it.
Raw chain bands include exchange cold wallets. The adjusted line subtracts only the exchange clusters this platform itself tracks and carries the tracked-cluster count in its caption — subtracting three clusters is not the reference chart's blanket exclusion of every exchange, and the caption must not read as if it were.
Clusters holding a negligible reserve are counted OUT by name rather than summed in, because 'minus 0 BTC' is an exclusion caption that excludes nothing.
The decade of reference-cohort history is a dated one-time extract held on disk. It does not refresh, it is drawn in its own colour, and the card states its extraction date on its face. Our own daily snapshots grow beside it.
One renderer serves every window. Branching on window length once left the longer views with an axis and nothing drawn on it. The price rail starts when the exchange's own record starts; the months before that have no price line and are marked as having none rather than borrowed from a second vendor.
The top-two headline and the reference cohort are not the same population. Ours sits well above theirs because it still contains the exchange cold storage their list removes.
Two series, never blended: the frozen extract and the live snapshots answer the same question from different vintages. An extract that stops announcing it is frozen becomes a live line that quietly is not.
Band membership moves for reasons that are not accumulation — a custodian splitting a wallet changes the bands without changing who owns what.
Open the live On-Chain tab →