Mooners and Shakers: Bitcoin Flat, But Whales Stack; Aptos blockchain gets off to a rocky start

by · October 18, 2022

If you listen to crypto-haters like Peter Schiff, they’ll tell you that Bitcoin has been left behind and looks lost amid the latest little stock rally. Beneath the surface, however, it looks like BTC whales are gathering.

And it is true that Bitcoin and the crypto market as a whole are struggling for a bit of direction at this moment. In fact, if there was an award for the best-performing sideways-moving asset outside of stablecoins, then Bitcoin would be in with a huge shout.

Here was Peter “I Bar Up Over Gold More Than Francisco Pizzaro” Schiff’s latest Bitcoin-related comment, by the way:

However, there is the odd bit of chain research popping up here and there in our content feeds that would at least indicate some potential for a positive breakout out of the excruciatingly low Bitcoin/crypto volatility we are in at the moment.

Bitcoin Devouring Whales

For example, data from blockchain research firm Santiment indicates that whales (holders of large amounts of a given asset) are accumulating Bitcoin at these US$19k-ish levels.

As BTC’s price continues its crabbing streak, addresses holding between 10,000 to 100,000 BTC have apparently reached their highest level since February 2021. By the way, it turned out to be quite a bullish month for crypto, although past results are not indicative of future resu … ah, you know.

$940 million in Bitcoin exchanges

And another small nugget of possibly positive information has come from another blockchain analytics firm, CryptoQuant, which suggests that roughly $940 million worth of Bitcoin (48k BTC) has just moved from major crypto exchange Coinbase.

This type of large BTC movement is sometimes seen as a good sign, indicating that whalers want to secure their asset in cold storage, reducing the likelihood of a sale/trade.

In addition, more than 121,000 BTC (over 2.3 billion USD) have left exchanges in the last 30 days.

The red lines on the CryptoQuant chart below indicate outgoing exchange. It doesn’t always follow that the outflow peaks are harbingers of price increases, but the large outflow that occurred in mid-June certainly saw some subsequent positive price action.

This latest currency outflow is the largest since June.

Bitcoin netflow from all exchanges. Source: CryptoQuant

On a daily price action.

Top 10 overview

With the total crypto market capitalization at USD 966 billion, down about 1% since this time yesterday, here is the current state of the top 10 tokens – according to CoinGecko.

As noted above, Bitcoin and its fancy top 10 friends are still hanging out somewhere on the Nullarbor Plain, dreaming of visual stimulation from the mountain range.

Clocking in some well-known go-to Crypto Twitter analysts, the sentiment is mixed. Justin Bennett, for one, actually no longer sounds so confident that a rally is particularly imminent, citing “unfinished business below $19k”.

However, “il Capo of Crypto” is pleased that there has been a double touch of support around the low $19k level and is going, er, “long and strong” on a potential double bottom…

Meanwhile, just touching the leading Layer 1 smart contract blockchain for half a second, Aussie Ethereum guru Anthony Sassano points out a reduction in post-Merge issuance for ETH in this tweet below. A very good thing for crypto’s deflationary narrative.

Aptos makes rocky debut

Aptos, yet another tier 1 blockchain to hit the crypto space, has made its long-awaited mainnet debut.

Expected, because it comes from Meta’s defunct Diem blockchain project and has been pumped in millions of VC dollars from the likes of Parafi, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), FTX and Multicoin Capital.

Blockchain’s original APT token is now set to debut on the market, but Aptos has faced a barrage of criticism for its lack of transparency so far regarding its token distribution model.

News has leaked that around 51% of the initial 1 billion APT supply is with VCs, while another 190 million is going to core developers of the project.

This has not gone well.

At the time of writing, the APT token is listed on crypto market aggregation sites such as CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap, but there is no price data available yet, and the project will be referred to as an “untracked listing” for the time being until full support is integrated from crypto trading platforms.

Overdraft and downdraft: 11–100

With a market cap of around $7.16 billion to around $392 million in the rest of the top 100, let’s find some of the biggest 24-hour winners and losers at press time. (Statistics accurate at time of publication, based on CoinGecko.com data.)

DAILY PUMPS

• Frax Del (FXS), (market cap: USD 453 million) +10%

• Aave (AAVE), (mc: USD 1.17 billion) +5%

• Arweave (AR), (mc: USD 515 million) +3%

• Curve DAO (CRV), (mc: USD 500 million) +2%

• Polygon (MATIC), (mc: USD 6.45 million) +2%

DAILY SLUMPERS

• Quant (QNT), (market cap: USD 2.68 billion) -11%

• EthereumPoW (ETHW), (mc: USD 738 million) -5%

• The LEO token (LEO), (mc: USD 4 billion) -4%

• Lido DAO (LDO), (mc: USD 4 billion) -1%

• The graph (GRT), (mc: USD 618 million) -4%

Around the blocks

An assortment of coincidences and relevance that stuck with us on our morning through the Crypto Twitterverse…

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