Bitcoin
Bitcoin Whales Have Sold Over $1 Billion in BTC in the Past Two Weeks: CryptoQuant
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Long-term bitcoin holders and miners have been significant sellers of the cryptocurrency over the past two weeks, with little indication of renewed buying interest.
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This trend has been observed through a decrease in UTXO age groups, indicating increased sales activity.
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Some sentiment miners are shifting their focus to the growing AI sector due to decreasing mining rewards following the halving, which may have increased selling activity.
Long-term bitcoin holders and miners have been among the biggest sellers of the asset over the past two weeks and are showing few signs of renewed demand, on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant said in a Wednesday report shared with CoinDesk.
Wallets tracked by CryptoQuant show whales – a colloquial term for large holders of any token – have sold more than $1.2 billion worth of BTC over the past two weeks, likely using brokers rather than on the open market.
#Bitcoin long-term holding whales have sold $1.2 billion in the last 2 weeks, likely through brokers.
ETF net flows are negative, with outflows of $460 million over the same period.
If this ~$1.6 billion in sell-side liquidity is not purchased in the OTC market, brokers will be able to deposit $BTC to exchanges, impacting the market. pic.twitter.com/oYeKsRqKeF
-Ki Young Ju (@ki_young_ju) June 18, 2024
“Traders are not yet increasing their Bitcoin holdings and demand growth from large holders (whales) still lacks momentum,” the analysts wrote. “Stablecoin liquidity continued to slow, growing at the slowest pace since November 2023.”
These traders have decreased their holdings since BTC prices traded above $70,000 in late May, lowering the UTXO age groups monitored by the CryptoQuant program.
The unspent output of bitcoin transactions, or UTXO, is created on each Bitcoin transaction and used by traders to track buying and selling patterns in previous, current, and future market cycles. A drop in UTXO age generally indicates an increase in Bitcoin activity and therefore sales. An increase suggests more market share.
UTXO age groups show lack of demand. (CryptoQuant)
Market watchers say miners may increasingly be looking to the growing artificial intelligence (AI) sector rather than bitcoin to conduct their trade, leading to them selling their bitcoin rewards rather than holding them. Both sectors rely heavily on powerful computing chips to generate and maintain data – a resource that miners already possess.
The story continues
“One of the biggest trends since Bitcoin halved this year is that miners are increasingly diverting into AI businesses,” shared Lucy Hu, senior analyst at crypto fund Metalpha, in a Telegram message. “The drop in mining rewards has led miners to look for other channels to increase revenue. With AI companies demanding energy-intensive data centers, Bitcoin miners are gradually increasing revenue from sales with AI companies.”
Since June 5, BTC prices have fallen from $71,000 to just over $65,000 on Wednesday due to the strong dollar, flight from riskier assets, and growth in traditional stock indices. Meanwhile, US-listed exchange-traded funds (ETFs) that track the asset recorded net outflows of more than $600 million last week – their worst performance since late April.
Some traders warned of a change up to $60,000 in the absence of growth catalysts.
BTC is down 0.6% in the last 24 hours, data from CoinDesk shows. The broad base CoinDesk20 (CD20)an index of the largest tokens, rose 1.2%.