Bitcoin Bitcoin Whales Quietly Stockpiled 150K BTC in Last Two Months

The 100 largest wallets (holding 10,000-100,000 BTC) excluding exchanges accumulated over 150,000 bitcoin in the past two months.

Do the Bart

In all the woe and misery of the crypto-winter, we can often find some meagre warmth from a positive story. An uplifting tale of a plucky hero, bucking the trend, and beating the system. Well this is not that story. While the rest of us felt the pain of Sunday’s ‘Bart’ on the chart, Bitcoin whales were busy accumulating coins. So that’s nice… for them.

Last week saw some interesting movement in bitcoin, with the price 00 jumping first to $4000, then again on Saturday to briefly hit $4200. Unfortunately, Sunday saw a reversal, with price dropping back to $3800. Still a good $200 more than it had been trading at, but not the breakout hoped for.

Of course, it wasn’t all bad news, as those who sold at the peak, or with cash to spare, could buy back in at the lower price. Which is exactly what the Bitcoin whales (holders of large amounts of bitcoin) did. In fact, that’s pretty much what the whales have been doing for this entire bear market.

In the past two months alone, holders of the 100 ‘fattest’ bitcoin wallet addresses have managed to accumulate over 150,000 additional coins, or well over half a billion US dollars.

52 Card Pickup

The five largest wallets belong to exchanges (Bittrex, Bitfinex, Bitstamp, Huobi, and Binance) which all hold over 100,000 bitcoin. In the two months from December 17, 2018 to February 25, 2019, these added 2879 BTC, making a total holding of 573,958 BTC.

According to data from BitInfoCharts, the next 100 largest wallets (holding 10,000-100,000 BTC) accumulated over 150,000 BTC in the same period. In fact, at time of writing, these wallets held nearly 2.29 million BTC. Although another 2 wallets had risen into this bracket by this point, making 102 whales.

Call Me Ishmael

So where have all these additional bitcoin come from? Well, according to the data the only bracket whose wallets have less BTC is from 1,000 – 10,000. One would imagine that the bulk of this move comes from wallets accumulating bitcoin and moving up into the next bracket.

Unless the whales had recently sold at the peak, they would have been financially better off buying at $3600 a week earlier than at $3800 after the drop. Nevertheless, whenever there are unexplained price movements, it is perhaps somewhat comforting that we can always blame the whales. Bloody whales!

Do you think ‘whales’ are taking advantage of lower bitcoin price to accumulate? Share your thoughts!

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