Crypto glossary
Miner outflows (miner reserves)
Miner outflows track bitcoin moving out of wallets linked to miners, especially to exchanges, while miner reserves measure how many coins miners still hold.
Miners receive newly minted bitcoin every day and must sell part of it to pay for electricity, hardware and debt. On-chain analytics firms label addresses that receive coinbase rewards and follow where those coins go. Outflows to exchanges are read as likely selling; the balance left in miner wallets is reported as miner reserves.
Traders watch these metrics for signs of supply pressure. Large or unusual outflows can precede selling, especially after a halving cuts revenue or when hashprice is squeezed, while steady or rising reserves suggest miners are holding. Spikes from wallets dating back to the earliest years of mining attract particular attention.
The data is noisy. Attribution of addresses to miners is imperfect, and coins sent to an exchange may be used as collateral, moved to custody or sold over the counter rather than on the open market. Many listed miners now publish monthly production and sales figures, which are often more reliable. Compared with daily ETF flows, miner selling is a smaller share of market volume than in bitcoin's early years.
Example
In the weeks after a halving, an analytics dashboard shows miner-to-exchange flows doubling while miner reserves fall by several thousand BTC, suggesting that squeezed miners are selling.