Bitcoin Whales Accumulate as Retail Wallets Decline: Bullish BTC Signal Ahead?

• Bitcoin wallets with more than 100 or more BTC have increased by 297 in the past two weeks, representing a 1.9% surge against the 0.1% increase of retail wallets within the same period. 
• An institutional-grade research firm has predicted that Bitcoin could hit $200k by the end of 2025. 

Bitcoin (BTC) whales make a profound entry into the market with aggressive purchases of a staggering 173,000 Bitcoins ($11.7 billion) in the past month, according to Glassnode data. Fascinatingly, Santiment data also confirms the massive accumulation pace of whales as wallets with more than 100 BTC increased by 297 or 1.9% in the past two weeks. According to other reports, the number has increased to 1,678, representing its highest level since January 2021.

Source: Santiment

Meanwhile, the number of wallets with less than 100 BTC, which could loosely be defined as retail wallets, has also reduced by 20,629 wallets or 0.1% in the past two weeks. Conversely to the staggering amount of Bitcoin accumulated in the past month by whales, retail investors only managed 1,000 BTC ($67 million) within the same period. From year-to-date, a historically low accumulation level of 30,000 BTC ($2 billion) has been recorded.

Source: Glassnode

More on the BTC Whale Activities

Investigating the whale activities further, we discovered that this batch of Bitcoin whales is accumulating for long-term gains. In the past six months, a whopping 1.5 million BTC ($100.8 billion) have been amassed. In addition, it was found that new whale wallets that are holding Bitcoin for less than 155 days have reached a record high of 1.97 million BTC.

Looking into CryptoQuant data, we also observed that the total whale holdings were around 3.9 million BTC ($261 billion), representing 20% of the Bitcoin market size. According to records, 670K BTC have been added to the existing holding since mid-2023. Confirming the Santiment report, CryptoQuant also disclosed that retail holdings have increased at a decreasing pace since the start of the year compared to that of the larger investors.

Since the start of 2024, the holdings of other larger investors (1-10K BTC holders) have grown faster than the holdings of retail investors every year. As of today, retail holdings have grown by 30K Bitcoin, compared to 173K Bitcoin of other larger investors.

In reflection of the long-term accumulation by large investors, Bitcoin has maintained a year-to-date growth of 53% to trade at $67.6k at press time. However, its seven-day gain is marginally down by 0.68%.

How Far Can the Bitcoin Price Go

According to institutional-grade research firm Bernstein analyst Gautam Chhugani, Bitcoin can reach $200,000 by the end of 2025 in a conservative estimate. This interestingly alludes to the projection of Cardano co-founder Charles Hoskinson recently reported by CNF.

In a client note shared, Chhugani pointed to the fact that the asset has a limited supply of 21 million. Per his observation, this could perfectly become useful in the face of inflating US debt levels.

If you are a Bitcoin skeptic, maybe a limited supply, a ‘store of value’ digital asset is not such a bad thing in a world where U.S. debt hits new records ($35 trillion now) and threats of inflation still loom. If you like gold here, you should love Bitcoin even more.

Confirming this bullish prediction, Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has surged to 95.67 terahashes. This is a 3.9% increase from the October 22 figure. From year to date, the mining difficulty has increased by 30% to reach more than 95 terahashes from the 72 level. According to our analysts, this points to a greater possibility of a Bitcoin rally.