Bitcoin whales holding between 10 and 10,000 BTC accumulated 0.9% of the total supply over the past four months, according to the crypto market analytics platform Santiment.
That bumps up to a full 1% when you consider that there’s 19,899,417 BTC currently circulating, leaving a portion of the original 21 million total Bitcoin supply that hasn’t been mined.
In the past 48 hours alone, Bitcoin whales accumulated 30,000 more BTC, on-chain analyst Ali Martinez said on X, citing Santiment dashboards.
At the time of writing, Bitcoin was changing hands at $118,556 after having gained 0.8% in the past day.
BTC is sitting level with its price from last week, according to price aggregator CoinGecko. Spot trading in the past day has ticked up significantly, to $44 billion.
Myriad Market odds have flipped a few times as users wager on whether Bitcoin will be above $119,000 by August 1. At the time of writing, detractors outnumber the optimists 55% to 45%. But the consensus has flipped at least 5 times since the prediction market opened at the start of the week.
(Disclosure: Myriad is a prediction market and engagement platform developed by Dastan, parent company of an editorially independent Decrypt.)
Even as Bitcoin whale accumulation ramps up, that’s been offset by profit taking from some large-scale HODLers.
Last week, one of the largest Bitcoin whales in history offloaded a huge swath of Bitcoin. It began with $3 billion that morning. But by the end of the day, the whale had unloaded $9 billion on the market with the help of crypto asset manager Galaxy Digital.
Glassnode analysts noted that remaining Bitcoin investors are still largely sitting in the green.
“Even after this large distribution event, the magnitude of unrealized profit held by market participants remains strong,” the analysts wrote. “Over $1.4 trillion in paper gains are currently held, with 97% of the circulating supply still in profit.”
Bitget Chief Operating Officer Vugar Usi Zade noted last week that whales are starting to develop an appetite for other assets as well.
“Notably, whales have accumulated large ETH positions, including SharpLink Gaming’s recent $463 million stake, while Solana continues to attract interest due to its thriving DeFi and memecoin ecosystems,” he wrote in a note shared with Decrypt.
Since he shared the note, SharpLink’s July Ethereum buying has increased. The company had dropped a combined $780 million on buying ETH in the month.
He added that that’s extended into some select meme coins too, like PEPE and WIF, which signals that large-scale investors are “diversifying into high-alpha plays, though the primary focus remains on established Layer-1 platforms with strong utility.”
Zade noted then that he expects to see the total crypto market capitalization renew its push towards $4 trillion in the third quarter. And the market cap did, in fact, rise above $4 trillion on July 27. But it’s since lost a little steam and is now $3.44 trillion—virtually unchanged from where it was a week ago.