Bitcoin frenzy has gripped the world as it went on a fierce rally above $24K. Despite a minor retracement, the world’s premier crypto-asset was being traded at $22,873, at the time of writing. With the new peak, it can be safely said that Bitcoin the new cycle has been gaining a lot of steam.
USDC Whale Deposits in Coinbase
In yet another interesting observation, USDC whales have reportedly been making massive deposits at Coinbase. This was noted by prominent crypto analyst and CEO of CryptoQuant, Ki Young Ju who also revealed that this trend, is most often followed by Bitcoin’s price rallying higher against the US Dollar.
Rationale
It is important to note that Coinbase is a huge hit among institutional investors, both old and new, especially in the US. Furthermore, the SF-based cryptocurrency exchange has registered a large number of OTC deals since mid-2020. It is no secret that institutional investors or high-net individuals are usually the ones who execute a significant portion of the OTC deals in question.
And according to the analyst, most of these investors have been using the dollar-pegged Coinbase and Circle-backed stablecoin. Both these platforms have a solid reputation which can be attributed to the rise in popularity of the stablecoin as Bitcoin surged to record levels.
Ki Young Ju had previously explained how several on-chain metrics help in estimating several OTC deals. The exec had pointed towards the massive BTC outflows from Coinbase which was around 6000-8000 BTC from exchange to the cold wallets of the users.
“If Coinbase moves a significant amount of Bitcoins to other cold wallets, it would indicate OTC deals. “
In the second week of December, British investment giant Ruffer LLC reportedly bought $700 worth of Bitcoin via Coinbase, in November this year. Adding to this trend was none other than the leading asset manager, Grayscale’s most popular product- the Grayscale Bitcoin Trust [GBTC], which has been on an accumulating spree, also amassed a massive quantity of the crypto-asset through Genesis Trading which in turn uses the Coinbase OTC desk.
To top that, the ‘Fund Flow Ratio’ also noted a spike in its figures in tandem with Bitcoin’s latest price action. Fund Flow Ratio for all exchanges is essentially the ratio of network transaction volume of exchanges among the entire tokens transferred on the network. And when this value goes up, it basically implies that most of the network transactions are exchange deposits or withdrawals.
Contrastingly, the transaction volumes are originating from non-exchange wallets. As noted by the analyst, since the price is eventually determined on exchanges, massive non-exchange transaction volume is often considered as a bullish signal, and that these transactions include OTC deals.
The exec’s final tweet read:
“Conclusion:
This $BTC bull-run never stops as long as these OTC indicators keep saying institutional-buying.”