Bitcoin price has seen a small rally leading up to yesterday’s FOMC meeting and has held up relatively strongly despite the US Federal Reserve’s aggressive outlook. A look at BTC’s daily chart shows that the price remained above $18,600. After an exuberant euphoria after the release of CPI databitcoin seems poised for a consolidation phase for now.
In the daily chart, bitcoin price was rejected at $18,220. Therefore, it seems likely that bitcoin will go through consolidation for now and look for a higher low. The support area to hold is currently $17,200 to $17,400.
Are Bitcoin Whales Signaling a Trend Reversal?
As on-chain data provider Santiment writes in a analysis, the fundamentals of bitcoin look extremely strong. Santiment pays particular attention to the shark and whale addresses, which hold between 100 and 10,000 BTC and are a notoriously important indicator of future price trends.
Santiment reports that shark and whale addresses have spent $726 million buying BTC in the past 9 days. In addition, 159 new addresses with a value between 100 and 10,000 BTC have been added in the past three weeks.
In total, there are currently 15,848 addresses with between 100 and 10,000 BTC. By comparison, there are currently 43.46 million minor bitcoin addresses, meaning that sharks and whales account for 0.0364% of the total number of BTC addresses.
The increase in shark and whale addresses is the fastest growth in 10 months, according to Santiment. Remarkably, this comes at a time when market sentiment is at its lowest in a long time following the bankruptcy of FTX and Binance FUD.
In the chart below, Santiment shows the behavior of the largest pocket holders of BTC, USDT, USDC, BUSD, and DAI. And as can be seen, all lines have been booming lately, while BTC price continued to fall.
As Santiment elicits, over the past 14 months the big players have been downsizing and dumping their bitcoin holdings. With these dump-offs, prices have plummeted. Now, however, there are signs of a reversal in the trend:
But maybe we are now seeing a change. Not necessarily with prices yet… but at least with whales finally piling up instead of dumping.
Whales store their dry powder
Not only the bitcoin statistics point to a turnaround, but also the stablecoin movements. “[W]We’ve just seen huge sudden jumps in the major $100,000 to $10 million USDT and BUSD portfolios worth $100,000 to $10 million,” Santiment said.
Key Tether addresses have collected $817.5 million (+7%) in purchasing power in the past 3 days and BUSD key addresses have collected $104.9 million (+9%).
Thus, according to Santiment, there are good reasons to expect the final weeks of 2022 to be bullish, although further crypto-intrinsic issues and macroeconomic headwind can dampen the joy.
