Bitcoin price is poised to continue its rally as whales swing
The Bitcoin price has seen a minor uptick ahead of yesterday’s FOMC meeting and has remained relatively strong despite the hawkish outlook from the US Federal Reserve. A look at the daily chart of BTC shows that the price managed to stay above $18,600. After the exuberant euphoria following the release of the CPI data, bitcoin seems ready for a consolidation phase for now.
In the daily chart, the bitcoin price was rejected at $18,220. Therefore, it seems likely that bitcoin will go through consolidation for now and look for a higher low. The support area to hold is currently at $17,200 to $17,400.
Are Bitcoin Whales Signaling a Trend Reversal?
As on-chain data provider Santiment writes in an analysis, bitcoin’s fundamentals look extremely strong. Santiment places particular emphasis on the shark and whale addresses, which hold between 100 and 10,000 BTC and are a notoriously important indicator of future price trends.
Santiment reports that shark and whale addresses have spent $726 million buying BTC in the past 9 days. In addition, 159 new addresses with a value between 100 and 10,000 BTC have been added in the last three weeks.
In total, there are currently 15,848 addresses holding between 100 and 10,000 BTC. In comparison, there are currently 43.46 million smaller bitcoin addresses, meaning that sharks and whales account for 0.0364% of the total BTC addresses.
The increase in shark and whale strikes is the fastest growth in 10 months, according to Santiment. Remarkably, this comes at a time when market sentiment is at its lowest in a long time following the FTX bankruptcy and Binance FUD.
In the chart below, Santiment shows the behavior of the largest bag holders of BTC, USDT, USDC, BUSD and DAI. And as you can see, all lines have risen massively recently, while the BTC price has continued to fall.
As Santiment evokes, the major players have been cutting and dumping their bitcoin holdings over the past 14 months. Prices have fallen in lockstep with these dump-offs. Now, however, there are signs of a reversal in the trend:
However, we can see a turnaround now. Not necessarily with prices yet… but at least with whales finally congregating instead of dumping.
Whales store their dry powder
The Bitcoin metrics aren’t the only things pointing to a turnaround, but so are the stablecoin movements. “[W]I just saw massive sudden jumps in the key $100k to $10m USDT and BUSD wallets worth $100k to $10m,” Santiment said.
Key Tether addresses have accumulated $817.5 million (+7%) more purchasing power in the last 3 days, and BUSD key addresses have accumulated $104.9 million (+9%).
Therefore, according to Santiment, there are good reasons to expect that the final weeks of 2022 will be bullish, although further crypto-inherent problems and macroeconomic headwinds may dampen the joy.
