Santiment: Bitcoin whales at a 3-year low, retail investors at a record high

According to on-chain data, larger investors, or so-called “whales,” have been selling down their bitcoin holdings over the past few months. On contrary, smaller investors’ BTC holdings are increasing, reaching a new record high.

Santiment considers BTC investors who own between 100 and 10,000 BTC units as whales. It recently detailed how their holdings have been steadily declining over the previous several months.

Whales holdings were also falling in September, but at the end of the month, the pattern changed and coincided with a small bitcoin price increase. However, as BTC’s price did not rise further, they started selling off their holdings and now only possess 45.6% of the total supply, a 3-year low.

🐳 #Bitcoin's small to mid-sized addresses (holding 0.1 to 10 $BTC) hold an #AllTimeHigh 15.9% of the coin's available supply. Meanwhile, whales (holding 100 to 10k $BTC) are at a 3-year low at 45.6% of the supply. #Stablecoin marketcaps are at a 2022 low. https://t.co/hesuwUf08X pic.twitter.com/Mcz23KQ4c7

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) October 18, 2022

The analytics firm also observed a big shift in how retail investors behaved at the same time (holdings between 0.1 and 10 BTC). Despite the market’s decline since the year’s start, their holdings have grown.

Whales are selling while retail investors are accumulating

Retail typically sells when the market starts to cool off and buys when the buzz picks back up, so this is very noteworthy. According to Santiment’s research, the landscape has completely changed, with whales selling and retail accumulating. In fact, the latter have risen to an all-time high, holding 15.9% of the total supply of BTC at the moment.

In times of ambiguity, stablecoin, a class which is currently a target of regulators across the world, is the favored investment tool among market players, but recently, this has not been the case. The market capitalizations of the two biggest stablecoins, USDT and USDC, have been declining recently, Santiment claims, going from more than $121 billion at the beginning of August to $113 billion right now. That represents a 6.6% fall in just two months.

The data from CoinMarketCap is even worse which says that on August 5, which was a record high, Tether’s market cap was above $83 billion but it currently struggles to reach $70 billion.