During a huge drop in the cryptocurrency market on August 5 and 6, onchain data shows that the number of Bitcoin whale transactions reached its biggest since April.
As Bitcoin fell below $50,000 on “Crypto Black Monday,” Santiment found that wallets holding 10 to 1,000 BTC “rapidly accumulated.”
On August 8, Santiment, an on-chain analytics tool, wrote on X that wallets between 10 and 1,000 BTC “rapidly accumulated on the price dip that saw crypto’s top asset fall below $50,000.”
As crypto prices fell, Santiment said there were 28,319 BTC trades worth more than $100,000 and 5,738 transactions worth more than $1 million on those dates.
It dropped from just over $60,000 to below $50,000 in less than a day, a loss of about 18%. It has since gone back up a little to reclaim the $57,000 mark after the dip buying.
The news site Cointelegraph said on August 7 that permanent holder addresses, or “whales,” had bought almost $23 billion worth of Bitcoin in the last 30 days, with the most buying happening when the market crashed.
CryptoQuant founder and CEO Ki Young Ju said, “It’s accumulation.” He also said that more than 400,000 BTC had been changed to permanent holder addresses since the beginning of July.
He also said that whales who had held BTC for over three years sold it to new whales between March and June. However, “there is no significant selling pressure from old whales at this time,” he said.
Cointelegraph said on August 3, just a few days before the big drop, that “whales” were already taking Bitcoin off markets at the fastest rate in nine years. The study says that since 2015, Bitcoin whales with at least 1,000 coins have taken the most BTC out of exchanges.
But that’s not true for buyers in spot Bitcoin ETFs in the US. Between August 2 and 6, $554 million left these funds, according to Farside buyers.
On August 8, market research company 10x Research said, “The lack of [ETF] buyers during this dip is alarming and raises concerns about the direction of the market.”
