It appears that yesterday’s dump on Bitcoin was partially caused by a large selloff by a whale that amassed the cryptocurrency directly through mining in 2010.
A total of 1,000 BTC were sold in the trading session by the mysterious entity, who previously appeared to have liquidated another mined stock in recent years, when the block reward was higher and there was very little competition in the market.
Let’s see in detail below what was the real impact generated by these sales on the price of Bitcoin and whether the whale still has resources to make money.
Bitcoin price action: yesterday’s dump was contributed by a whale that mined BTC in 2010
Yesterday, when Bitcoin was about to experience the first major dump after a long streak of positive candles, a whale that mined the cryptocurrency in 2010 decided to hit the sell button, highlighting the decline.
According to the website btcparser.com, the major BTC holder transferred a total of 1000 BTC to Coinbase, in several transactions within block 833,219, for a value of approximately 63.29 million dollars.
In general, these transfers to exchanges originated from 20 different Pay-to-Public-Key-Hash (P2PKH) addresses, each containing 50 bitcoins (the original block reward in 2010), then consolidated into a single Pay-to -Script-Hash ( P2SH) address, publicly visible on block explorer as “36i1W”.
The same coins, which then sold at exactly historic highs during yesterday’s trading day, were originally mined in August, September, October and November 2010, when the currency traded at a price of $0.39.
Nobody knows who is hiding behind the cryptographic identity of the miner: what is most frightening is the impeccable timing with which the individual managed to liquidate their coin just before the big bitcoin dump arrived.
Contrary to popular belief, the whale has not been inactive for 14 years, but has moved several coins in the past to make a profit.
The same address from which the first coins were withdrawn is in fact responsible for another 16 transactions in which a total of 17,000 BTC was moved.
The first transfer dates back to March 11, 2020, exactly 1 day before bitcoin recorded a 40% dump amid the panic spread by the arrival of covid-19.
After March, the second survey was in October of the same year, followed by other transactions made in the following months.
The whale returned to activity in 2021, this time also hitting the Bitcoin ATH at $69,000 before the long dumping phase typical of the next bear market
From that moment, the topic remained inactive for two years, only to reappear in December 2023, and finally just a few days ago.
It is very curious that the movements of the entity correspond to very important moments for the price action of the asset, precursors of trend reversals in the medium term, and sometimes coincide with historical dates on the bitcoin calendar, as happened on the date of its anniversary on January 3, 2021.
According to some estimates (not currently verified), the whale still possesses several coins, ready to be moved at the most opportune moment.
Exchange volumes significantly higher than the entity’s sales
At this point, we move on to observe what was actually the “damage” caused to the price of Bitcoin by the selling of the alleged whale just before yesterday’s dump.
Many users on X seem convinced that the profit-taking by this entity was the move that caused the collapse, which led to liquidations of more than 1 billion dollars of futures positions in the market.
In fact, if we simply observe the data of the volumes on the main cryptographic exchange markets, we notice that the impact of a 1000 BTC sale should be minimal on the price of the asset.
For example, on Coinbase yesterday a total of 65,575 BTC was traded (only on the BTC-USD trading pair) for a total value of more than 4.3 billion dollars.
Even assuming that all the quota transferred by the whale was immediately liquidated (we can only guess, but not empirically prove), this would only represent 1.52% of the spot volumes recorded on Coinbase, all without taking into account the other trading pairs of the exchange. , the other spot markets, the futures markets and the multi-billion dollar exchanges taking place on Wall Street through the new ETFs.
In this regard, the latter appear to be the real catalysts of new impulses, in pump or on dump, given the large amounts of capital that during trading sessions in funds managed by BlackRock, Grayscale, Fidelity, Bitwise etc.
Yesterday, trading on bitcoin ETFs reached a record volume of $9.58 billion, about 150 times the all-time value sold by the whale yesterday.
At most, we can throw a stone in favor of those who think that the transfer of 1000 BTC was still an event to be considered, if we suppose that it might have pushed other big whales to switch to sales.
Following the flow of capital managed by those in the crypto world for many more years than us, could indeed have been the strategy of various operators, who, noticing the liquidations by the dormant address, also decided to sell their own shares.
However, since we cannot verify this hypothetical correlation, we simply describe transactions of this magnitude as “irrelevant” as they alone could not have caused the magnitude of the dump we saw yesterday.
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