Although cryptocurrencies have reached record market values, they are currently about a quarter of the size of the gold market. Therefore, whales that hold a certain portion of the supply gain the ability to influence prices in any direction they want. So who exactly are the whales influencing Bitcoin and altcoin prices? In short, we will seek an answer to this question…
The biggest Bitcoin whales
Currently, the biggest whale in the market is Satoshi Nakamoto, who has even been the subject of documentaries and has almost a country’s economy in his wallet. The Bitcoin creator is known to hold 1.9 million BTC and his fortune exceeds $40 billion. Of course, since 2013, when Bitcoin started to be listed on stock exchanges, hundreds of individual investors have gained the title of “whale”. For example, the twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, known as the true inventors of Facebook, currently hold around 78,000 BTC, averaging $141. Additionally, American venture capitalist Tim Draper is known to have purchased 29,656 Bitcoins with an average of $632.
Institutional investors can be considered as BTC whales. Of these companies, Grayscale manages $28 billion worth of Bitcoin, which is 3% of its current market value. It also owns about 0.58% of the supply, with 18.75 million Bitcoins on MicroStrategy. Finally, we can say that cryptocurrency exchanges are the biggest whales. These centralized institutions, which have been in and trading cryptocurrencies since the early days, have large amounts of BTC in their hands to increase and decrease the liquidity of their market. According to a 2019 study by TokenAnalyst, they own 6.7% of the total Bitcoin supply.