Currently, the price of bitcoin seems to have found stability above $6,000 as it trades just above $6,600, up more than 70% from the 2020 low we put in a couple of weeks back at $3,850.

During this price crash when Bitcoin declined over 50%, Japanese retail investors jumped into the flagship cryptocurrency.

Yuya Hasegawa, a market analyst at Japanese cryptocurrency exchange BitBank said the price crash put a pressure on the already battered market. For the past few weeks, bitcoin has been trading like a risky asset and continues to mirror stock market movements as COVID-19 pushed investors out of risky assets to the safety of cash.

As we reported, short-terms sellers were responsible for this sell-off as over 280,000 BTC were dumped by these holders on the market while HODLers’ confidence was unshaken.

While Bitcoin along with gold was getting sold-off “underneath the surface, there has been an interesting development in the Japanese crypto market.”

Japanese retail investors have been actually stacking the sats as a week after the price of bitcoin tanked, BitBank’s weekly account registration jumped 40% over the 2020 average. During this time, the number of daily KYC-passed accounts were also above-average levels.

Another crypto exchange Kraken also reported an increase of a whopping 83% in the account signups over the week the price crashed.

This considerable jump in the number of email registrations in the days following the historic decrease in price indicates that retail investors bought the dip.

It’s different from 2018 crash

At the end of 2018, between November and December, the world’s leading cryptocurrency experienced a loss of 50%. However, the selling pressure was so strong and persistent at that time that the price didn’t have any significant rebound even during the period of heightened volume.

It was when bitcoin bottomed at about $3,200 that the crypto asset entered into a hibernation period called ‘Crypto Winter’. During this period, bitcoin sustained its volatility at record-low levels for a few months and took four months to see a 70% jump while this time it took just a week.

Also, there weren’t any increase in daily account registration rather they took a hit at BitBank.

An increase in the price of Bitcoin combined with the spike in the daily account registration indicates “the current market recovery is driven largely by retail investors.”

As for what drove the investors to jump into bitcoin, it could be the block reward halving scheduled for May 2020. Less than two months away, the data on Google Trend shows that the interest in the event is constantly surging.

There is no guarantee that halving would push prices higher as has happened in the past, but the market has surely started to gradually pricing the event in. According to Hasegawa, retail investors are buying BTC at the cheapest price before the halving.