Bitcoin, the flagship cryptocurrency, has been holding on to the $3,650 mark after enduring two sell-offs that saw its price drop from about $4,050 to $3,850, and then to its current mark, as whales have reportedly started resurfacing.
According to CryptoCompare data the cryptocurrency is currently trading at $3,649 after falling less than 1% in the last 24-hour period. Its market cap has fallen to $63.6 billion.
As reported by Bloomberg, however, since October a large number of bitcoin whales that hadn’t touch their holdings for between six months and two and half years started moving their coins. The trend has continued, as wallets active in the last 30 days now hold roughly 60% of the flagship cryptocurrency’s supply.
The news outlet’s data comes from analytics provider Flipside Crypto. Its head of data science, Eric Stone, was quoted as saying:
It’s definitely a big shift. There’s more potential than usual for price swings.
He added that the supply of active BTC has risen 40% since last summer, and that similar wallet activity was observed before, in 2015 and 2017, when the price of most cryptocurrencies surged to new all-time highs, with bitcoin coming close to $20,000 in December.
As CryptoGlobe covered, a study conducted by China’s state-run financial publication National Business Daily (NBD) found that about 0.7% of all bitcoin addresses currently control roughly 86.9% of the cryptocurrency’s circulating supply. This concentration of wealth is worrisome for investors, as whales can easily affect the market.
Stone added:
The fact that those wallets have been recently active leads us to believe they could soon be active again. Put another way: We have no reason to expect them to remain stagnant for another 2-plus years.
Jesse Colombo, an analyst at RIA Advisors, has recently argued that a chart pattern shows BTC may be on its way to $1,000, as it could erase 2017’s gains completely. Another analyst, Mati Greenspan, revealed he sees the recent sell-offs that took BTC down to $3,650 as just normal cryptocurrency volatility.
