Bitcoin Whales Moved Nearly $60 Million In Five Days

Even long-dormant Bitcoin whales can’t sit still.

A number of big investors holding millions of dollars in BTC moved their holdings last week after years of dormancy. 

On July 20, two wallets from 2011, each holding 10 BTC (valued at $292,767 as of this writing), moved their holdings to new locations. The next day, a wallet holding 5 BTC ($146,383) budged after 12 years of inactivity. 

Then, around $30.3 million in “digital gold”—or 1,037 BTC—moved after its owner put it in a new wallet for the first time since 2012. The price of the cryptocurrency was $4.92 per coin back then.

Finally, on July 24, a wallet from 2010 moved a hefty 50 BTC, or $1.4 million. 

Number of Bitcoin Whales Drops to Lowest Level Since 2019

The number of Bitcoin (BTC) whales, or wallet addresses holding 1,000 or more BTC, hit its lowest level since August 2019 on Sunday. There were 2,027 whales on Sunday, February 19, according to crypto analytics service Glassnode; the last time their number dropped this low was August 5, 2019, when they numbered 2,023. Owning that much Bitcoin at its current price of around $25,000 represents a sizeable show of faith in the digital currency, with each whale holding almost $25 million in Bitcoin....

 Bitcoin whales are investors who hoard huge amounts of Bitcoin (at least 1,000 BTC) and don’t touch it for years, sitting on astronomical gains as a result.

Such investors have proven to be more successful than traders that buy and sell Bitcoin over a short period: the asset is extremely volatile in the short-term but over the past 10 years it has shot up from under $95 per coin to $29,203—a 30,700% increase. 

Whales have certainly been on the move this year. Blockchain data firm Glassnode said in a Monday report that there has been a “dramatic uptick over recent months,” and noted that a number of whales have been moving holdings to exchanges—usually the best way to cash out, or shift holdings to other digital assets.

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It isn’t clear whether these whales are individuals or companies, but Dr. Kirill Kretov, a developer of tools for automated trading and blockchain analyst, previously told Decrypt that it was possible that these transactions represent commercial entities buying the Bitcoin from individuals.