What Is The Main Risk Associated With A Cryptocurrency Hot Wallet?
Cryptocurrency wallets play a crucial role in the digital finance ecosystem, allowing users to store, send, and receive cryptocurrencies....
The top large-scale Bitcoin investors, or Bitcoin whales, are adding to their Bitcoin holdings, with a more than 16% accumulation to their portfolios over the past month.
The top 100 wallet addresses saw around 334,000 Bitcoin, which was around $11 billion USD worth of Bitcoin at the time of transacting, flood in.
How did whales respond to the price drop?
Surprisingly, 93% of the top Bitcoin whales barely blinked when Bitcoin fell from its new all-time high of $41,000 USD to below $33,000 USD. 7% of the addresses made a transfer out of their wallets – likely to trade or sell – since Bitcoin saw its new record price. The movement of the cryptocurrency from the wallets implies that the whales are looking to hold for medium to long-term investment. Only eight of the top 100 wallets have had more than ten transactions since the middle of December.
Several of the addresses, while anonymous by nature, are known to be controlled by leading entities and cryptocurrency corporations such as exchanges Several of the addresses are owned by cryptocurrency exchanges including Huobi, Binance, Bittrex, and Kraken – made up of several addresses per company. The others are alleged to be controlled by either wealthy Bitcoin bulls and institutional investors.
Huobi stands as the owner of the single largest wallet at the time of writing, Bitfinex is the fourth largest holder, and Binance stands in the top ten as the ninth largest wallet currently.
What is a Bitcoin whale?
To classify as a Bitcoin whale, or stand as one of the largest investors in the cryptocurrency industry, a wallet address must hold more than $336 million USD worth of Bitcoin. The top ten addresses count for more than $2.2 billion USD worth of Bitcoin per address. According to data tracker BitInfoCharts, only 36% of the top addresses have transferred out of their addresses, meaning the majority of the large scale holders have only accumulated and never sold their Bitcoin.