After a long time of holding on to their Bitcoins, the whales have been unloading them this month at a high rate. Glassnode mentioned in their recent report that the whales have been selling their huge stocks of BTC in the market during the month of February.
According to Glassnode, a whale is an investor or any other address that is holding Bitcoins in quantity between 1000 to 10,000 BTC. On the other hand, a humpback whale is an entity holding more than 10,000 Bitcoins. The report suggested that the number of whales has significantly increased by a huge amount of 14% this year, just by 5th Feb 2021, merely a month into the new year.
Bitcoin Shopping Spree
The purchasing spree of the whales and humpback whales was at its peak in the month of January, and they took over an extraordinary amount of 80,000 Bitcoins which are worth around $3.84 billion in terms of the current Bitcoin prices.
This was not the end of the story. The whales and the humpbacks started to sell these bitcoins from the start of February and gained massive profits. They sold around 140,000 Bitcoins, $6.72 billion according to today’s value.
The data states a very interesting pattern. The buying and selling pattern of the whales and the humpbacks is inverse to other small but wealthy investors. The Glassnode denominates these investors as sharks or dolphins, and they hold around 100 to 1000 Bitcoins. The report shows that these sharks and dolphins offloaded around 95,000 Bitcoins worth about $4.56 billion during January and, as opposed to the whales, bought a sum of 117,000 Bitcoins collectively, having a value of $5.61 billion starting February.
Another class of Bitcoin holders is Octopus and Fish investors. These investors hold around 10 to 100 Bitcoins in their wallets. These investors have a totally different pattern of buying and selling, and they have been selling their BTC from the start of November 2020; and in just four months, they have sold over 128,000 Bitcoins which are worth $6.14 billion.
A smart whale cashed out a sum of $156 million just before the 20% price dip of Bitcoin and managed to avoid loss. The price of Bitcoin is speculated to be held over $50k as the institutional purchasers take charge.