Bitcoin Whale Activity Reaches Highest Weekly Levels in 2023
On-chain data shows that the Bitcoin whales have continued to be active recently, with the last week being their 2023 week of highest average activity.
Bitcoin whales show the highest activity in 16 weeks
According to data from the analysis firm on the chain Sentiment, Wrapped BTC (WBTC) has also seen high whale activity in the past week. The relevant indicator here is the “whale transaction count,” which measures the total number of transactions made on the Bitcoin blockchain that are at least $100,000 in value.
The $100,000 cutoff is chosen because generally only the whales (both the small and the big ones) are able to move such a large amount of the cryptocurrency in a single transaction.
When the value of the number of whale transactions is low, it means that there are not many large transfers happening on the blockchain at the moment. Such a trend suggests that the whales are not very active on the network right now.
On the other hand, high values of the indicator suggest that whales have an active interest in trading the asset at the moment. As the transfers made by these whales are so great, enough of them taking place at once can sometimes have the power to move the market. For this reason, when the metric shows this trend, the asset’s price may experience somewhat elevated volatility.
Now, here’s a chart showing the number of whale transactions, as well as its 30-day moving average (MA), for both Bitcoin and WBTC over the past few months:
Looks like the value of the metric for both the coins has been pretty high in recent days | Source: CryptoQuant
As shown in the graph above, the number of Bitcoin whale transactions has been at relatively high levels recently as the cryptocurrency’s price has observed a strong upward trend. However, the daily values have actually declined compared to the peaks seen a week or so ago.
But the 30-day MA for the metric has only moved up despite this, as the big peaks seen before were more isolated, while the indicator has seen more consistently high values in recent days.
The number of 30-day MA Bitcoin whale transactions has now reached its highest level in 16 weeks as these huge holders are now doing more than 10,000 transactions per day. This suggests that Bitcoin whales have been quite active on the blockchain recently.
The WBTC whales are also observing a period of increased activity, as their 30-day transaction number has now reached a 15-week high. WBTC is an ERC-20 token backed 1:1 by BTC, meaning its value is the same as the latter.
Since the whale transaction indicator does not distinguish buying volume from selling volume, it is difficult to tell what effect the elevated values of the metric may have on the asset.
The effect can go both ways, bullish or bearish. However, one thing that has remained generally true is that the asset’s price becomes more volatile when the whales are active like this.
BTC price
At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $28,200, up 15% in the past week.
BTC continues to move sideways | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView
Featured image from Richard Sagredo at Unsplash.com, Charts from TradingView.com, Santiment.net
