A seven-year-old Bitcoin whale sold $76 million worth of BTC and opened a massive position in ETH

A seven-year-old Bitcoin whale sold $76 million worth of BTC and opened a massive position in ETH

The whale, which had held more than 14,800 Bitcoin for many years, made a sharply timed move. It used the sold BTC to open long positions in Ether (ETH), joining the growing wave of institutional buying and speculation on the second-largest cryptocurrency.

What happened

- A long-term Bitcoin whale, who owns 14,837 BTC worth over $1.6 billion (purchased more than seven years ago on the Binance and HTX exchanges), sold 670 BTC on Wednesday. The price of a single BTC at the time was approximately $113,893, which corresponds to a sale of approximately $76 million.

- From the proceeds of the sale, it used these funds to open four long positions in ETH, totaling 68,130 ETH. Lookonchain reported this on X (formerly Twitter).

Details of the positions and their development

- The positions were opened at a price of around $4,300 per ETH. Most of the ETH was deployed with around 10x leverage, with a smaller portion, 2,449 ETH, deployed with 3x leverage.

- Although the opening of positions in ETH was immediate, the price of Ether fell to around $4,080 after the purchase. Three of the four open positions thus ended up in the red and were only a few hundred dollars away from liquidation levels around $3,699–3,732.

Current context of the ETH and BTC markets

- Meanwhile, the ETH market is experiencing strong institutional interest. On Tuesday, during the market downturn, three large investors sold 17,972, 13,521, and 3,003 ETH, but other speculative market players waited for lower prices to buy them.

- Two wallets associated with institutions purchased an additional 9,044 ETH for approximately $38 million.

Institutional purchases of ETH and large holdings

- BitMine Immersion Technologies expanded its ETH treasury by 52,475 tokens, bringing the company's total holdings to 1.52 million ETH, worth approximately $6.6 billion.

- In connection with the movements of whale and institutional accounts, there was also a report of older whales reclassifying their BTC packages.

Notes on other transfers

- From the "old guard" of Bitcoin: a whale from the Satoshi era, which had 80,201 BTC, began transferring shares to Galaxy Digital after 14 years of inactivity; the final transfer took place on July 16.

- On the same day, another smaller whale woke up and transferred 1,042 BTC worth approximately $123 million to a new wallet after a long period of inactivity.

- Crypto analyst Willy Woo said in June that whales with more than 10,000 BTC have continued to sell since 2017, which he said was a reaction to growing interest from institutional players.

Outlook

This movement shows that even whales who have held BTC for a long time are responding to current market dynamics and spreading part of their positions among other key cryptocurrencies. At the same time, it testifies to the continuing institutional activation in ETH, which in recent weeks has manifested itself not only in purchases but also in significant changes in the holdings of major players. How ETH will develop and what impact the movement of whales will have on the price remains a topic of interest for the market.

*This is not an investment recommendation.

The Coingarage Team