Santiment found that addresses storing between 100 and 1,000 BTC (so called “whales”) now hold 21.3% of all existing bitcoin.
#Bitcoin ended the weekend scraping above $56.3K, and #crypto continues to be a whales’ market. Addresses with 100-1,000 $BTC accumulated 85.7k $BTC beginning at the late Sept. bottom. These whales hold 21.3% of supply now, their largest of all time. https://t.co/EkTxdBgUHc pic.twitter.com/SaMvlcaMFt
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) October 11, 2021
Whales rule the Bitcoin market
That percentage has been growing strongly since late September, when it fell to 20.7%. The growth seems to have stopped yesterday after exceeding 21.5%.
Compared to the low peak at the end of September, in about two weeks these addresses would appear to have accumulated more bitcoin worth nearly $4.8 billion, suggesting that whales may have made purchases in the last two weeks.
It is worth bearing in mind that 100 BTC have a current market value of more than $5.5 million, while 1,000 BTC are equivalent to about $56 million. These are therefore addresses that belong either to real whales, or to organizations that operate on the markets on behalf of their users/customers.
The current level of 21.3% is an annual high for this metric, which is also higher than the 21.2% seen at the end of April, when the price of bitcoin was falling sharply after peaking in mid-month.
Even then, there was a sudden rise in the value of this metric, although over the course of the following months it fell to an annual low of 20.7% in mid-September.
Santiment comments:
“Bitcoin ended the weekend scraping above $56.3K, and crypto continues to be a whales’ market”.
Santiment on the accumulation of bitcoin in recent weeks
At the end of July, the price of bitcoin rose again after two solid months of being just above, or just below, $30,000. Santiment revealed that in the previous five weeks, the whales had accumulated 130,000 bitcoin, worth more than $5 billion. The dollar amount accumulated in the last two weeks is similar, indicating that the whales were in a much greater hurry to accumulate this time than they were in July.
It is possible that these accumulations indicate that the whales are expecting the price to rise. As was the case after the end of July, with the price rising again during August, first to $40,000 and then to $50,000, after falling again to $40,000 in mid-September.
In total there are less than 14,000 Bitcoin addresses worldwide that hold between 100 and 1,000 BTC, while there are only just over 2,000 addresses that hold more than 1,000 BTC. Those containing between 10 and 100 BTC are almost ten times as many (131,000). They therefore contain a similar number of BTC as the upper range.
In total, the bitcoin stored on addresses that have less than 10 BTC each are less than 15%, so they are unlikely to move the market. However, bitcoin held at addresses having between 10 and 1,000 BTC are as high as 44% of the total, and it is these that can influence the market.
Among the largest addresses are many that belong to crypto exchanges, which store the funds of millions of customers.
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