Bitcoin Whales appeared to be been cashing out which snowballed into and unbearable selling pressure in the market.
February has been historically corrective for Bitcoin. Over the past week alone, the crypto-asset lost more than 20%. and was down to $45,381.
Accompanying yet another daily correction was an unknown wallet transfer with a significant amount by a Bitcoin whale who happens to be the 241st largest wallet of the cryptocurrency.
This was revealed by the blockchain tracker ‘Whale Alert’ which notified the transfer of more than 7,000 Bitcoin by an anonymous whale which was then worth approximately $337 million.
The transaction in question was made at 01:53 UTC from an unknown wallet to another unknown wallet.
Besides, Bitcoin has had an exceptionally trying week and the sell-offs have coincided with several other whale movements. Due to the anonymity of the Bitcoin whale transfers, they were either speculated as institutions moving coins to cold storage, or huge over-the-counter [OTC] trades or internal transfers between exchange wallets.
What sparked even more curiosity was some really ancient Bitcoin whale movements whose coins were lying dormant for more than a decade.
Willy Woo’s Take On Bitcoin Whale Movement
Whale movements can sometimes jolt the markets. For instance, a Bitcoin whale movement back this past December sung the crypto-asset’s price just as it crossed $20,000. According to an expert, however, the series of panic sell-offs that shook the market this February was was due to falsely generated concerns regarding a whale dumping.
In a recent interview on What Bitcoin Did, the popular on-chain analyst and market researcher, Willy Woo claimed that incorrectly spawned market concerns over a whale dumping $1.5 billion in Bitcoin is what likely generated the panic sell that eventually resulted in the cryptocurrency’s price drop to a low of $45,230 on the 26th of February.
Woo, along with Glassnode CTO Rafael Schultze-Kraft went on to confirm the transaction in question was merely an internal transfer of the exchange’s funds.
He said,
“I was trying to figure out this big sell-off. And, you know, the very peak of it started when there was a little alert that we had $1.5 billion that just moved onto the exchanges to sell… the assumption was to sell. And I think that spread amongst traders and we started to see the sell-off preempting that.”