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Eight years ago today, on October 6, 2014, as the price of bitcoin fell to $330 per unit, an anonymous Bitstamp trader placed an order to sell 30,000 bitcoins. In addition, the trader, now infamous as the “Bear Whale”, was selling the coins for $300 per unit, putting extreme pressure on the nascent bitcoin market which had approximately $29 million per day in global trading volume.
While bitcoin (BTC) is trading just below the $20K region, about eight years ago today, bitcoin traders encountered the infamous “Bear Whale.” It was October 6, 2014, when the anonymous trader decided to sell 30,000 BTC in a single trade at $300 per coin.
At the time, the trader was looking to get $9 million from the sale, and today those bitcoins are worth roughly $603 million. When the event took place, the crypto community went wild and it even caught the attention of the mainstream media. The price of bitcoin just before Bear Whale’s infamous dump was around $330 and the trader’s monstrous sell wall of $300 was eaten up by market traders that day.
Five years ago, Bear Whale allegedly posted to Reddit claiming that it was his address that sold the coins, and he went on to say that he was buying bitcoins for $8 per unit. He also noted that he quickly put up the 30,000 BTC trade that day because he wanted to get away from his desk.
“I could have gotten a better price if I spent more time working on the order, I guess,” Bear Whale told the r/bitcoin Reddit community at the time. “I put up the wall because I didn’t want to just sit in front of the computer all day,” Bear Whale added.
Almost immediately after the anonymous Bitstamp trader made the sale, the crypto community dubbed the seller Bear Whale and they created memes around the infamous bitcoin seller. The name Bear Whale paid homage to the infamous London Whale, a JPMorgan Chase trader who lost $6.2 billion on botched trades. Bitcoiners mythologized the event by saying that society “killed” the formidable beast on October 6, 2014.
“I feel like singing that whale meat song,” said one bitcoiner after the sales wall was defeated. “Haha, so the whale lost almost a million dollars by selling everything for 300 instead of splitting it and selling around 325,” wrote another person from r/bitcoin.
While the community thought it was a mad battle between market forces, Bear Whale mentioned in his Reddit post that he simply lost faith in the leading digital currency at the time. Reportedly, Bear Whale’s reason for coming out with his identity was because of the scaling debate, and he later decided to go “all-in on bitcoin again”, while bitcoin (BTC) was trading at just over 1,000 nominal US dollars per coin .
The lesson to be learned from Bear Whale’s story is that it is quite possible that a big whale could lose faith in BTC again, or at the right price point might dump billions of dollars worth of bitcoin. However, the markets are much more robust than they were in 2014, when the average daily volume was around $29 million per day.
Currently, BTC’s 24-hour global trading volume is around $32.63 billion at the time of writing, which is 112.425% larger in size compared to 2014’s daily BTC trading volume. At the time eight years ago, Secondmarket CEO Brendan O’Connor told CNBC that the move was a “very ‘immature’ way to liquidate that amount of coin.”
O’Connor further emphasized that it ruined his Sunday. “I’ve got to tell you, it makes no sense at all from a trading standpoint. That’s the last way in the world you actually want to liquidate a big position like this,” O’Connor told the news reporter on Oct. 9, 2014.
What do you think of the Bear Whale story that took place on this day in 2014? Let us know what you think about this topic in the comments section below.
Image credit: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Christopher Edwin Steininger, Luis Buenaventura, Reddit
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