A bitcoin whale that has been inactive since 2011 with 80,000 BTC on its wallet could “crush the market completely,” according to analysts with the Twitter-based transaction monitor Whale Alert.
During an interview with crypto dealer SFOX, those behind Whale Alert noted that there are dormant bitcoin whales who could suddenly decide to sell their holdings, in a move that could “crush the market.” In a given example it was noted a BTC address with 80,000 bitcoin, currently worth around $744 million, could crash bitcoin’s price by selling his holdings.
During the interview, they said:
That address alone — if that is actually a whale who’s been holding their coins for so long without doing anything with them — if they decide, ‘Okay, let’s go sell them,’ it would crush the market completely.
Whale Alert added, however, it’s unclear whether there’s a bitcoin holder with 80,000 coins in a single wallet that has been waiting for the right time to sell, or whether the private key to the address they’re in was lost, or whether the person who controlled it passed away.
The only thing we can do, they said, is wait to see if these addresses move any coins. The address, like many among the top dormant bitcoin addresses, has been receiving small amounts of BTC over the last few months, but these could come from regular crypto users testing out features, or from someone trying to identify who’s behind the wallet.
According to Whale Alert a whale dumping funds on the market wouldn’t be a new event, as between August 29 and September 6 of 2018 a large BTC holder sold around $1 billion worth of the cryptocurrency on exchanges. This led to a price drop of 15%.
The recent seizure of BTC from one of the darknet’s largest child porn websites, Welcome to Video, also influenced bitcoin’s price as Whale Alert tracked down 10,000 BTC (around $93 million) that were moved to Binance.
In the interview, they noted:
Almost directly after that big transaction, the price of BTC dropped.
As CryptoGlobe reported last year some bitcoin whales have been known to use price drops to accumulate more, which means some of the whales that aren’t dormant take advantage of crashes to buy more. Earlier this year, a mysterious whale bought 20,000 ETH on Binance raising eyebrows.
Featured image via Unsplash.
