If we use the data and data from Glassnode whales (1,000 bitcoin or more) are currently the most speculative cohort within the bitcoin community. “The dominance of whale inflow volumes to exchanges is significant, accounting for 41 percent of the total. Of that 41 percent, more than 82 percent goes to Binance, the industry’s largest exchange,” said Glassnode.
Speculative whales
What Glassnode also sees in the data is that many of these active whales qualify as short-term holders. Those are entities that have owned their bitcoin for less than 155 days. Short-term holders is a qualification developed by Glassnode based on historical data.
They found that entities that have held their bitcoin for less than 155 days have a much higher chance of selling it again in the short term. This is now also apparent from the data, because these whales are sending their bitcoin to the exchanges in large numbers.
The fact that whales are less and less long-term investors is also apparent from the above graph from Glassnode. In this we see how the whales still held 76 percent of all bitcoin in 2011 and today only 46 percent.
Also, Glassnode data shows that the whales’ total bitcoin balance has dropped by 255,000 since May 30. “That is the largest monthly drop in history and represents a drop of about 148,000 bitcoin per month,” said Glassnode.
What are the whales doing now?
At the moment, the sales behavior of the whales seems to be diminishing somewhat. For example, Glassnode sees that the balances of whales with more than 100,000 bitcoin have increased by 6,600 bitcoin in the past 30 days. Whales with 10,000 to 100,000 bitcoin saw a decrease in the balance of 49,000 pieces and whales with 1,000 to 10,000 bitcoin saw an increase of 33,800 bitcoin.
On that note, we’ve seen a decline of only 8,700 bitcoin under the whales. It is also notable that whales sent coins to the exchanges at a rapid pace during the most recent rally of bitcoin.
It ended up being an average of 16,300 bitcoin per day, so they dominated 41 percent of the inflows. That number is about the same as during the LUNA crash (19,800 pieces and 39 percent) and the implosion of FTX (15,500 pieces and 33 percent).
In that respect, it seems that whales have lost their faith in an early bull run for a while.