Whale bitcoin inflows are surfacing today as cryptocurrency markets are in a sea of red this afternoon, with on-chain activity showing increased selling pressure in the market.
An anonymous whale just shifted 4,999 Bitcoin, worth nearly $275 million at the current price, to unknown wallets, according to Twitter-based crypto transaction tracker Whale-alert.io.
After hitting a fresh record peak at $61,780 on March 13, Bitcoin saw a period of bearish indecision that ended in a sharp sell-off. It was changing hands below $54,000 on Tuesday, which is down by more than 10 percent in the past 24 hours. The No.1 crypto asset then bounced back to $55,150, capping daily losses to around 6%.
Already looked over and nothing that looks like hot/market wallet. Most likely, based on tx characteristics, it’s part of exchanges protocol or OTC deal: 18K #BTC -> ~5K #BTC and ~13K #BTC sent back. Can’t verify exchange as yet, but not a short-term bearish signal from data.
— This is Bullish (@thisisbullish) March 16, 2021
The sentiment around Bitcoin among market participants remains mixed. While some expect a pullback to support levels below the $50,000 handle, others say BTC simply consolidates until the next rally occurs.
In addition, the distributed ledger monitoring has reported dozens of giant USDT transactions in the last hour.
One of the largest transactions involved a whale relocating 20,000,000 XRP worth $9.1 million from Nexo to a separate wallet of Binance origin. The Twitter handle Whale_Alert noted another transfer of 6009 ether, worth roughly $10.6 million, from Gemini crypto exchange to an anonymous wallet.
It is not the first time that multiple transactions of this magnitude have taken place, but such moves are rarely seen in the market. Bitcoin whales have been moving large stacks of their holdings at record levels over the last two months, amid high institutional demand for the crypto assets.
Although it is impossible to know why the cryptocurrency was moved, it could just be that a cryptocurrency exchange is shuffling its own holdings. Additional speculations include internal transfers between exchange wallets, institutions moving crypto to cold storage or OTC block trades.