Average time ZEC has remained in each pool without crossing a pool boundary, in days. This measures how long coins sit in a pool — NOT how old the coins are. A coin actively transacting within a shielded pool (z-to-z) still accumulates residency time. Only cross-pool flows (shielding/deshielding) reset the clock. Computed via cumulative "coin-days" — each ZEC accumulates one coin-day per day in the pool. Outflows reduce coin-days proportionally to the average duration.Read the full description
It is how long ZEC has sat in a pool without crossing a pool boundary. A coin can be transacted daily inside Orchard — z→z, real payments, real activity — and its residency keeps climbing the whole time, because nothing it did was a crossing.
Only shielding and deshielding reset it. That is not a design choice so much as the only thing this data can see: a payment inside a shielded pool is private by construction, so no metric here can know it happened. Residency measures the one movement consensus exposes.
So rising residency is not dormancy. It is consistent with a pool nobody touches and equally with a pool being used heavily by people who never take value out of it — and on a privacy chain the second is the healthier outcome. For transparent coins, where real age IS visible, see mean transparent coin age.