Bitcoin whales are on the move

In the days celebrating 13 years of Bitcoin, whales are in particular turmoil, making maxi-transactions, as denoted by the Whale Alert Twitter account. 

Bitcoin whales’ maxi-transactions

Today, a 778 BTC (or about $36 million) transaction was made from Coinbase to a wallet. Even more important is the 456 Bitcoin ($21 million) transaction, transferred from Coinbase to an unknown wallet. 

🚨 🚨 456 #BTC (21,161,750 USD) transferred from #Coinbase to unknown wallethttps://t.co/1rWMaIYR0y

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) January 3, 2022

The peculiar thing is that this whale holds in his/her wallet more than 120,845 BTC which is equivalent to 5 billion dollars. The identity of the whale is unknown.

Whales withdraw from exchanges

These tweets confirm a trend that seems to be well established: there are fewer and fewer Bitcoin on exchanges and whales prefer to keep their BTC in private wallets. This has two implications:

• there are fewer and fewer BTC in circulation;
• whales are not willing to sell. 

These two considerations could lead to an increase in the price of Bitcoin, due to the scarcity of circulating supply. 

The price of Bitcoin

At the moment, Bitcoin actually seems to be struggling to recover the psychological rather than technical threshold of $50,000. Bitcoin has been hovering around $47,000 for days now. At the time of writing this article, BTC is above parity but has been on a rollercoaster ride for a few days with the price caged in the range between $46,000 and $48,000, having lost this support in the last days of 2021. 

Who are the whales?

Whales are defined as holders of large amounts of cryptocurrencies. Their role is central to the market. Whale movements can lead to large price fluctuations. If whales start selling large amounts of BTC, the price is bound to fall. Conversely, as they buy, they will tend to drive up demand and therefore value.

They are also indicators of price trends, as large purchases also indicate confidence in consolidation or growth in value. Some analyses say that it will be whales that will sustain Bitcoin’s price growth in 2022.