It seems that yesterday’s dump on Bitcoin was partially triggered by a large sale by a whale who accumulated the cryptocurrency in 2010 directly through mining.
A total of 1000 BTC were sold in the trading session by the mysterious entity, which had previously appeared to liquidate another mined supply in past years, when the block reward was higher and there was very little competition in the market.
In detail, let’s see below what was the real impact generated by these sales on the price of Bitcoin and if the whale still has resources to monetize.
Summary
Bitcoin price action: yesterday’s dump was contributed by a whale that mined BTC in 2010
Yesterday, as Bitcoin was about to experience the first major dump after a long series of positive candles, a whale that had mined the cryptocurrency back in 2010, decided to press the sell button, accentuating the decline.
According to the website btcparser.com, the large BTC holder has transferred a total of 1000 BTC to Coinbase, in several transactions within block 833,219, for a value of approximately 63.29 million dollars.
Overall, these transfers to exchanges originated from 20 different addresses Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH), each containing 50 bitcoins (the original block reward in 2010), then consolidated into a single Pay-to-Script-Hash (P2SH) address, publicly visible on block explorer as “36i1W“.
The same coins, then sold at exactly historical highs during yesterday’s trading day, were originally mined in August, September, October, and November 2010, when the currency was traded at a price of 0.39 dollars.
No one knows who is hiding behind the cryptographic identity of the miner: what is most frightening is the impeccable timing with which the individual managed to liquidate their coin stash just before the big bitcoin dump arrived.
Contrary to what many believe, the whale has not been inactive for 14 years, but has already moved several coins in the past to make some profit.
The same address from which the first coins were extracted is in fact responsible for another 16 transactions in which a total of 17,000 BTC were moved.
The first transfer dates back to March 11, 2020, exactly 1 day before bitcoin recorded a 40% dump in the midst of the panic spread by the arrival of covid-19.
After March, the second survey was in October of the same year, followed by other transactions made in the following months.
The whale returned to activity in 2021, also hitting this time the Bitcoin ATH at 69,000 dollars before the long dump phase typical of the following bear market
From that moment on, the subject remained inactive for two years, only to reappear in December 2023, and finally just a few days ago.
It is very curious that the movements of the entity correspond to very important moments for the price action of the asset, precursors of trend reversals in the medium term, and sometimes coincide with historical dates on the bitcoin calendar, as happened on the date of its anniversary on January 3, 2021.
According to some estimates (not currently verified), the whale still owns several coins, ready to be moved at the most opportune moment.
Volumes of exchange significantly higher than the entity’s sales
At this point we move on to observe what were actually the “damages” caused to the price of Bitcoin by the sales of the alleged whale just before yesterday’s dump.
Many users on X seem convinced that the profit taking by this entity was the move that caused the crash, leading to liquidations of over 1 billion dollars of futures positions in the market.
However, in reality, observing what are simply the data of the volumes on the main cryptographic exchange markets, we notice that the impact of a 1000 BTC sell should be minimal on the price of the asset.
For example, on Coinbase yesterday a total of 65,575 BTC were traded (only on the BTC-USD trading pair) for a total value of over 4.3 billion dollars.
Even assuming that all the quota transferred by the whale has been liquidated instantly (we can only guess, but not empirically prove), it would represent just 1.52% of the spot volumes recorded on Coinbase, all without considering the other trading pairs of the exchange, the other spot markets, the futures markets, and the multi-billion dollar exchanges happening on Wall Street through the new ETFs.
In this regard, the latter seem to be the real catalysts of new impulses, in pump or on dump, given the large amounts of capital moved during trading sessions in funds managed by BlackRock, Grayscale, Fidelity, Bitwise etc.
Yesterday, trading on bitcoin ETFs reached a record volume of $9.58 billion, approximately 150 times the value sold yesterday by the whale at all-time highs.
At most, we can throw a stone in favor of those who think that the transfer of 1000 BTC was still an event to be taken into consideration, if we hypothesize that this may have pushed other large whales to switch to sales.
Following the flow of capital managed by those in the crypto world for many more years than us could indeed have been the strategy of several operators, who, noticing the liquidations by the dormant address, also decided to sell their own stocks.
However, since we cannot verify this hypothetical correlation, we simply describe transactions of this magnitude as “irrelevant”, as they could not alone cause the extent of the dump we witnessed yesterday.
