The price of Bitcoin trading below $ 60,000 for over a week has now allowed some whales to accumulate more parts of the asset. On-chain data suggests that long-term holders and whales have bought 0.29% of the total supply in just a week.
Bitcoin’s whales are piling up
Since peaking at $ 69,000 on November 10, the price of bitcoin has been falling, losing about 20% of its value and hitting a low below $ 56,000 a week later. While this vigorous price drop in a relatively short period could shake off some weak hands, it’s not the case with long-term holders (LTHs) and whales.
The latter group, generally considered to be entities containing between 100 and 10,000 BTC, has experienced a buying frenzy, as the analysis company Santiment pointed out. They have used the opportunity to buy bitcoin at cheaper rates (compared to 15 days ago) and have accumulated roughly 59,000 coins in just a week – the same seven-day period in which BTC’s price remained below $60,000.
Some of these purchases are most likely from the third largest whale. As previously reported, the anonymous entity purchased around $ 375 million worth of BTC in eleven days.
It’s worth noting that whales tend to purchase more coins when the asset’s price has cooled off following a significant rally, as the chart above demonstrates. This was the case in early July and September, when their holdings had declined. As they started to pile up, the price of BTC also increased.
BTC Withdrawals and LTHs’ Behavior
As CryptoPotato recently outlined, the number of bitcoins withdrawn from exchanges has started to pick up, with more than 23,000 coins moved to cold wallets. Additionally, long-term holders also refused to panic to sell substantial portions of their BTC positions during the retracement.
Data from Glassnode showed that they had reduced their holdings by just 0.7% in the course of a month after peaking at 13.5 million bitcoins.
In contrast, short-term holders reacted more to the increased volatility and sold larger portions of BTC.
