Bitcoin whales unload over $2 bln in BTC — Why?

Jour­nal­ist

Post­ed: Novem­ber 14, 2023

• Bit­coin whales have begun to sell their holdings.
• The coin’s price has become less volatile in the past two weeks.

In a sig­nif­i­cant shift in mar­ket sen­ti­ment, Bit­coin [BTC] whales have ini­ti­at­ed coin dis­tri­b­u­tion, sig­nal­ing an inten­tion to secure prof­its amidst recent price consolidation. 

In a recent post on X (for­mer­ly Twit­ter), pseu­do­ny­mous cryp­to ana­lyst Ali Charts not­ed that over the past week, hold­ers of 100 to 10,000 BTCs have col­lec­tive­ly sold around 60,000 BTC, equiv­a­lent to about $2.22 bil­lion at cur­rent mar­ket value.

#Bit­coin whales have been book­ing prof­its, sell­ing
or redis­trib­ut­ing around 60,000 $BTC over the past week, worth rough­ly $2.22 bil­lion. pic.twitter.com/xmzHGXs5gu

— Ali (@ali_charts) Novem­ber 13, 2023

The market has grown increasingly less volatile in the past few weeks 

When the mar­ket ral­ly com­menced in Octo­ber, the sig­nif­i­cant surge in BTC’s val­ue caused its price to be prone to swings. 

In a report dat­ed 20th Octo­ber, pseu­do­ny­mous Cryp­to­Quant ana­lyst Migno­let found that BTC record­ed a notable uptick in the spent out­puts of its short-term hold­ers (3–6 months) on 19th Octo­ber as over 125,000 dor­mant BTC coins changed address­es on that day.

Source: Cryp­to­Quant

Gen­er­al­ly, this kind of sud­den coin move­ment con­tributes to increased volatil­i­ty in the BTC mar­ket. This led the ana­lyst to opine, “We might see sig­nif­i­cant volatil­i­ty soon.”

BTC volatil­i­ty mark­ers on the dai­ly chart con­firmed Mignolet’s posi­tion as they spent the rest of Octo­ber chas­ing new highs. 

How­ev­er, in the past few weeks, these mark­ers have trend­ed down­wards. It sug­gests a decline in price volatil­i­ty as BTC stag­nates under $37,000. 

For exam­ple, the coin’s Aver­age True Range (ATR) – which mea­sures mar­ket volatil­i­ty by cal­cu­lat­ing the aver­age range between high and low prices over a spec­i­fied num­ber of peri­ods – has dropped by 2% since 1st November. 

When this indi­ca­tor expe­ri­ences a decline, it sug­gests that the price of an asset is mov­ing less errat­i­cal­ly and is more like­ly to stay with­in a cer­tain range. At press time, BTC’s ATR was 1042.54.

Like­wise, in the last two weeks, there has been a grad­ual reduc­tion in the gap between the upper and low­er bands of BTC’s Bollinger Bands indicator. 

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The nar­row­ing of the dis­tance between these two bands sug­gests that BTC’s price is becom­ing less volatile. This posi­tion was fur­ther con­firmed by the Bollinger Band­width (BBW) indi­ca­tor. The indi­ca­tor declined by 68% in the last 14 days. 

As of this writ­ing, the coin’s BBW was 0.12. On 1st Novem­ber, it was 0.37. 

Source: BTC/USDT on TradingView