The total supply of Bitcoin on exchanges has reached its lowest level in seven years, after dropping to 2.488 million BTC on Friday.
Exchange reserves currently sit at 2.492 million, having increased by around 40,000 BTC over the weekend, yet the level remains its lowest since October 2018, according to CryptoQuant data.
This exodus comes as Bitcoin’s price sits at $95,400, with the coin now looking to build on gains posted last week, after the Trump administration voiced willingness to reach a deal on tariffs with China.
And while the exchange balance is reaching seven-year lows, Bitcoin funds witnessed $3.2 billion in inflows in the week to April 28, as per the latest CoinShares Digital Asset Funds Flows report.
This marks a significant turnaround in the context of several consecutive weeks of negative flows, with last week’s report showing a month-to-date outflow of $894 million.
The combination of declining exchange balances and increasing fund inflows points to a renewed phase of accumulation. But amid the past week’s gains, retail appears to be playing a bigger role than it has done in recent weeks.
This is evident in the exchange whale ratio, which has fallen from 0.512 on April 17 to 0.36 on April 27.
This measure is a ratio of the top 10 exchange inflows compared to total inflows, with a maximum score of 1 indicating that the top 10 inflows—meaning whales—account for the entire market on exchanges.
However, the current ratio suggests that retail is playing a bigger part in the current wave of trading, which in turn suggests more organic demand for Bitcoin.
There are likely various factors in this demand, with some traders and analysts drawing attention to how Bitcoin has decoupled to some extent from tech stocks in recent weeks, and how it has been more closely following gold.
But Bitcoin’s actual correlation with gold since the beginning of the year has see-sawed considerably, taking in 0.74 at the end of January, –0.87 in early February, 0.54 in early March, –0.36 in mid-March, 0.62 at the end of March, –0.50 in early April, and 0.55 as of this writing.
It would therefore be premature to conclude that Bitcoin genuinely is beginning to behave like digital gold, even if its recent performance amid the backdrop of economic uncertainty has played into this narrative.
On the other hand, one piece of data that does give more support to the safe haven thesis is the Bitcoin dominance index, which is the ratio of BTC’s market cap to the capitalization of the entire crypto market.
According to CoinMarketCap, this has risen from 54% in early December to 63.4% today, something which could be taken as a reflection of traders moving from very volatile alts to the less volatile BTC.
At the same time, the Bitcoin volatility index has generally been fluctuating within a narrower band over the past couple of years, witnessing fewer of the large spikes that would occur prior to 2023.
However, there has been no particular or further reduction in its volatility in the past few weeks, with April 7 yielding the index’s second-highest reading of 2025, when it rose from 3.4 to 6.71 as the coin plunged to a five-month low of $74,773.
Edited by Stacy Elliott.