The number of bitcoin whales with at least 10,000 BTC, worth around $159.89 million at press time, has matched its 2020 high of 111, while the number of wallets with 1,000 to 9,999 BTC is just 6 below its all-time high of 2,135 wallets.
The figures were shared by on-chain analytics firm Santiment, which implied that bitcoin whales – large cryptocurrency holders – are becoming increasingly bullish on the flagship cryptocurrency, as its price keeps climbing higher.
While in the beginning of last month BTC was trading around $11,000, the price of the cryptocurrency has been steadily going up since then and has recently tested the $16,000 mark. At press time bitcoin is trading close to $15,900.
Bitcoin managed to get past the psychological barrier at $10,000 earlier this year in late July, but the cryptocurrency’s price dropped after hitting $13,000 shortly after, and only started moving up significantly in late October. In the last 12 months, it’s up over 80%.
The cryptocurrency’s price is moving up at a time in which Grayscale Investments, a cryptocurrency asset manager that operates various funds giving investors exposure to crypoassets, has been seeing record inflows. As reported, Grayscale added $1.4 billion to its assets under management in October alone, and the firm now has over $9.1 billion in assets under management in total.
The bull run also started after PayPal launched a new service letting users buy, sell, and hold crypto using its platform. The service is for now only available to users in the U.S. and supports bitcoin, bitcoin cash, litecoin, and ether.
To some analysts, however, the price of the flagship cryptocurrency is also going up thanks to the recent halving event, which reduced block rewards on the blockchain from 12.5 BTC per block to 6.25 BTC, effectively reducing the supply of new BTC entering the market.
Featured image via Unsplash.
