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BTC whales are people, institutions or platforms with a huge amount of Bitcoin (BTC) in their wallets.
How many BTC whales there are and how many BTCs do they have
- The top 100 richest hold 15.02% of BTC’s total offering, or 2.8 million BTC;
- The first 10 addresses hold 6.04% of the total BTC offer,
- There are more than 2 million addresses that have at least $ 10,000 in BTC.
Although BTC provides pseudo-anonymity, it is possible to trace the identity of some of these whales.
Cryptocurrency exchanges
According to Bitinfocharts, some of the largest holders of BTC addresses are exchanges. Specifically, the richest is the cold wallet Binance with more than 288,000 BTC. It is followed by the cold Bitfinex wallet, which contains more than 178,000 BTC. There are also two OkEX cold wallets, each with more than 80,000 BTC. Huobi’s 73,000 BTC cold wallet is also in the top 10 (9th place).
Individuals
Then there are a few individuals who have accumulated a huge amount of BTC.
The first whale in BTC’s history is Satoshi Nakamoto. He supposedly extracted 1 million BTC in the early days of cryptocurrency. But these BTCs are motionless, indicating that the mysterious creator is dead. It happens that some of these sleeping wallets wake up, but there are not enough clues to prove that it is really Satoshi.
The Winklevoss twins are also whales. He owes his fortune thanks the compensation received from Mark Zuckerberg at the time of the lawsuit over the creation of Facebook. They invested part of this property in BTC. The year was 2013.
Whales also include Tim Draper and Barry Silbert.
Tim Draper is considered one of the first “institutional” investors. He bought 42,000 BTC, which he lost by hacking the MT. Gox then bought 30,000 BTC at a court auction related to the exchanges’s failure.
Berry Silbert is the founder of the Digital Currency Group and a member of Grayscale and Coindesk. He obviously turned his business into cryptocurrencies. Like Tim Draper, he bought Mt. Gox 48,000 BTC.
Institutions
We can mention one of the institutions in particular: Microstrategy. Today, it has more than 105,000 BTC in its portfolio. And we must not forget Tesla.
Whales and the market
But what happens when whales invade the market? Technically, whales can manipulate the market. If a whale decides to make large purchases, it can pull the market up, causing an increase in FOMO. Conversely, if he decides to convert his BTC into cash, he can place large sales orders and increase pressure. This triggers a chain of sales that pushes the price of BTC down.
Their role is by no means marginal. Especially with the continued entry of institutional investors, whales are likely to play a significant role.
