On-chain data analytics company Glassnode examined whale movements in Bitcoin in its week 30 report.
Drawing attention to the direct link between Bitcoin price and whale movements, the report stated that the 2023 rally was mostly shaped by short-term Bitcoin holding whale movements.
Some of the highlights of the report are as follows:
“Whale movements are key locks for Bitcoin that have a huge impact on price performance. In this report, we examine whale activity, which has seen a dramatic rise in recent months.
While the dominance of whales on the market was 63% in 2021, we see that it has decreased to 46% today. This shows that whale assets are shifting to large central wallets like ETF products, GBTC, WBTC or institutional investors.
The chart below shows that whale wallet balances decreased by 255k after May 30. These wallets have experienced the largest monthly balance loss in history, with 148,000 BTC exiting this month.
When we look at the change in the last 30 days, wallets with more than 100 thousand BTC experienced an increase of 6600 Bitcoin, while wallets holding 10 thousand to 100 thousand BTC experienced an outflow of 49 thousand Bitcoins. During this period, wallet balances holding 1000 to 10 thousand BTC increased by 33 thousand BTC.
All whale groups, including exchanges, only netted 8.7k BTC last month.
Despite the huge entry of 255 thousand whales, the net changes were not very high, indicating that this could be a whale shift.
During the last rally, whale entry volumes on exchanges increased significantly, reaching +16.3k BTC per day. This is a whale dominance of 41% of all stock market entries, comparable to both the LUNA crash (39%) and the FTX crash (33%).
If we examine whale entry volumes, we can see that about 82% of whale-to-exchange flows go to Binance, 6.8% to Coinbase and 11.2% to other exchanges.
Short-term owner dominance in stock listings has risen to 82%, significantly higher than the last five years (usually 55% to 65%). From here, we can spot a case where most of the recent trading activity is driven by short-term whales active in the 2023 market.
These data show that whale holdings for Bitcoin often have a significant impact on the market price. Although these whales are quite difficult to watch, they have become more and more active in recent months. Notably, 42% of the stock market entries are related to whale assets, the vast majority of which are for Binance.
We can deduce that most of the active whale assets are classified as Short-Term Holders and that the 2023 rally is also driven by short-term whales. “
You can find the original report here.
