Yesterday, August 16, 2021, there were nearly one million active addresses on the Bitcoin blockchain in just 24 hours.
That was revealed by Santiment, which notes that there was a spike in activity that lasted an hour, the largest since July 4, despite the market was relatively flat.
📈 #Bitcoin has just hit its largest single hour of address activity since July 4th 🇺🇸, despite a mostly flat Monday thus far. This spike, occurring between 6pm and 7pm UTC, shows an increase in the total unique addresses interacting on $BTC's network. https://t.co/cEmRXmzvAQ pic.twitter.com/khoi3RAqG4
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) August 16, 2021
The spike occurred between 18:00 and 19:00 UTC, when the price of BTC hovered between $46,600 and $46,300, and just before the drop that brought it down to $45,600 in less than two hours.
After that, bitcoin’s price fell again until it hit $45,300 in the early hours of today.
Santiment’s chart also shows a sort of cyclicality in the total number of active addresses on the bitcoin blockchain over 24 hours.
In fact, as of July 19, four cycles can be distinguished, very similar to each other both in numbers and duration, with the peaks of activity in the early days of the week and a significant drop during the weekends.
In particular, during the last weekend, the number of active addresses over 24 hours dropped to below 650,000, which has not happened since the mid-July weekend, i.e., before the last bitcoin price drop below $30,000. However, the following Monday, the 850,000 active addresses were not exceeded, while yesterday, the 950,000 threshold was even exceeded.
Bitcoin, active addresses confirm the dominance of institutions
The fact that during weekends, when retail investors are more active and institutional investors less so, the number of active addresses regularly drops, with the following peak in the first days of the week, i.e., when companies go back to work, adds further confirmation to what we already discovered a few days ago thanks to the data revealed in Coinbase’s Q2 2021 report.
In fact, it is now clear that the increased activity in cryptocurrency markets, and in particular in bitcoin, is due more to large institutional investors than to the tens of millions of small retail investors.
On the other hand, for some time now, the average value of individual transactions on the bitcoin blockchain constantly exceeds $ 300,000, clearly revealing the dominance of the whales. However, to this figure, it is necessary to add that the median is much lower (less than $800) and that this figure does not consider transactions made off-chain, for example, with Lightning Network.
In addition, the median value of individual on-chain transactions is heavily influenced by the substantial capital movements of exchanges, often done with a minimal number of transactions but a considerable magnitude.
