Bitcoin’s small-scale holders [<1 BTC] known popularly as “shrimps” is on an accumulation spree for quite some time.
When issuance is just 27k BTC per month, these investor cohorts are stacking sats at a pace of 33.8k BTC per month. This implies shrimps are removing 1.25 coins from circulation for every new coin that is issued.
CheckMate, a well-known analyst, observed the unusual behavior and labeled it as “crazy conviction” on display
In total, these wallet owners are now holding 1.33 million Bitcoins, according to Glassnode data. The corresponding amount is a staggering $41 billion.
In addition to “shrimps,” the investment cohort known as “Crabs,” which holds between 1 and 10 BTC, saw a threefold surge in the number of addresses.
However, market experts believe that the uptick in the address count was primarily driven by old addresses i.e., addresses that were active but not participating in transactions rather than present conditions.
As demonstrated by a recent tweet from Axel, who reported a rise in the number of “old” addresses [ones that were active but no longer process transactions], despite a corresponding decline in the number of new addresses.
Overall, it would suffice to say that retail investors were actually driving the trend of accumulation among long-term coin holders.
Moving on to the large-scale holders, sometimes referred to as whales and sharks in space, have been amassing the flagship crypto Bitcoin over the past few weeks.
Bitcoin Large Holders Have Scooped Up Over $4 billion
Santiment, a noted on-chain analytics firm, reported that since the end of April, holders with between 10 and 10,000 bitcoins in their wallets have bought over 154k bitcoins, totaling over $4.75 billion, with a notable buildup taking place during the last two weeks.
This buildup coincided with BlackRock, the largest asset manager in the world, filing for exchange-traded funds or ETFs.
Apart from retail investors, Bitcoin, the number 1 ranked crypto has also seen a significant uptick in its accumulation trend by entities that make investments on behalf of someone.
As noted by prominent data analytics platform CryptoQuant, BTC “fund holdings” among institutional investors have grown exponentially.
The term “fund holdings” refers to the cryptocurrency assets held by institutional investors, including hedge funds, private cryptocurrency funds, and investment companies.