Bitcoin Whale Trading This Week
This week in particular was marked by BTC’s sharp moving prices.
BTC’s volatility was particularly pronounced this week. On Monday, the pioneering digital currency lost the 50K mark in one of the worst sell-offs of the year. Considering that it had reached 70K the week before, it was a drop of almost $20K in a week.
More recently, Bitcoin is once again trading above $61,000 per coin. This volatility suggests that the big whales continue to trade in an equally unstable manner. In fact, these large investors used this downturn to increase their bitcoin positions.
First Part of the Week
The end of last week saw a massive sell-off in the cryptocurrency market. It started on Thursday with the July U.S. jobs report and was consolidated with mass liquidations of Bitcoin ETFs on Friday. By Sunday, the big BTC whales were doing their part as well.
This reality continued into the first day of the week. On Monday, August 5th, the sell-off was significant. Exchanges such as Binance and Bybit received large coin flows from large wallets. However, by the middle of the same day, another large group of whales took advantage of the BTC crash.
Tuesday and Wednesday saw the highest whale activity in four months, according to Santiment:
“August 5 and 6 saw the highest level of bitcoin whale transactions since the first week of April. According to the total holdings of wallets with 10 to 1,000 BTC, they rapidly accumulated on the price dip that saw the crypto’s top asset fall below $50,000.”
Second Part of the Week
Bitcoin whales slowed their buying pace on Wednesday. The US consumer debt report likely played a role in this slowdown. According to IntoTheBlock data, a total of approximately 28,000 bitcoins left exchanges during the week.
Between Monday and Tuesday, most of this hoarding would have occurred. Whale buying came to a relative halt on Thursday and Friday, as noted above. However, they resume this Saturday.
Recent Moves
The whales show special movements so far on Saturday. Recently, WhaleBot Alerts operated movements of returning funds to exchanges, according to the Telegram bot. In particular, one whale moved 15,506 BTC to HTX.
Meanwhile, on Friday there were two transactions, one of over 2,325 BTC towards Kraken and another of 1,100 towards Binance. The same day, a whale moved 11,684 Bitcoins from Coinbase to an unknown wallet.
As can be seen, the recent bitcoin whale movements are predominantly bullish. The only negative move was the 15,000+ Bitcoin move made to HTX.
Institutional Trade
The dynamics of large portfolios were not much different in the spot bitcoin ETF arena. In this respect, Monday and Tuesday saw strong outflows or liquidations of shares of these ETFs. Withdrawals of $317 million were recorded during these two days.
On Wednesday and Thursday, however, flows were positive, totaling $239.7 million, as reported by Farside Investors. On the closing day, Friday, there were settlements of $89.7 million, which saw a slowdown in the price of bitcoin and the temporary loss of $60,000.
By Audy Castaneda