The price of bitcoin (BTC) has fallen from $49,000 to $40,000 in eight days following the movement of a mysterious whale detected by market analyst, James Van Straten.
The whale, the name given to an investor with more than 1,000 bitcoins, would have sold more than 100,000 bitcoins when the price of the currency reached $49,000, says the analyst.
This is based on on-chain data from the Glassnode explorer that indicates the number of bitcoins per entity that were last moved in different price segments, as seen below.
According to Van Straten's research, the whale acquired more than 100,000 bitcoins in the 2021 bull run when the coin was trading at $48,000. Therefore, he indicates, it was in losses since BTC fell from that price more than two years ago, which would have led it to take profits as soon as it surpassed that price.
“That caused a frenzy in the market,” which was combined with liquidations of leveraged positions in futures and a phenomenon of “ selling the news ,” says the analyst.
The “buy the rumor and sell the news” strategy refers to acquiring an asset before some expected beneficial event occurs and selling it to take profits once that event occurs, even if it is something positive, as happened before the launch of ETF. As a result of this combination of factors, Van Straten highlights, bitcoin recorded its largest one-day price drop since the collapse of the FTX exchange.
Such a fall took place, after a wave of massive sales by whales and smaller investors, which became the largest profit-taking since bitcoin hit its highest price in history two years ago. Such movements were driven by both long-term and short-term holders, who transferred $2.2 billion in BTC to exchanges , marking an all-time high for this type of transaction.
Bitcoin could lose USD 40,000
Another reason that recently affected the price of BTC is the net flow that the spot bitcoin ETFs have been receiving, which were launched a week ago.
Yesterday was the worst day for net money flow of funds to purchase BTC. Precisely, together, they had outflows of $134 million, a figure that they had to sell of their bitcoins, he explained.
Given this, the price of bitcoin has experienced multiple setbacks to the USD 40,000 area in the last 24 hours. And, according to the analyst, this makes it possible that, if the downward pressure continues, it will fall to the support zone of $34,000.
