Big Money Entering the Largest Network as Whale Dominance Rises

A couple of weeks ago, we reported that the Grammy-nominated rapper Logic had bought Bitcoin.

Now, in his latest tweet, the retired rapper changed his Twitter account name to “Bobby Bitcoin” — that’s real love, Logic just needs to replace his Bs with the official Bitcoin symbol “₿.”

Alright fuck Twitter I’m going to play chess and count my Bitcoin….

— Bobby Bitcoin (@Logic301) November 19, 2020

Logic isn’t the first big name to publicly disclose that he is now a Bitcoiner; in 2020, everyone is jumping on the Bitcoin bandwagon, except for Jamie Dimon, Warren Buffett, Nouriel Roubini, of course.

Just this week, Maisie Williams of Game of Thrones stacked some sats. At the same time, high profile names like Mexico’s second-richest person Ricardo Salinas Pliego, legendary investors Steven Druckenmiller and Bill Miller also joined in.

Even Ray Dalio said he might be missing something about Bitcoin and would love to be corrected about it. Before them, Paul Tudor Jones, MicroStrategy, and Square went in. Simon Peters, an analyst at investment platform eToro, told Reuters,

“The crypto industry has consolidated, matured, and is seeing real traction with institutional investors. Investors are using bitcoin as an inflationary hedge to combat the prospect of continued government stimulus.”

So, it makes sense that this rally is driven by whales rather than retail.

MicroStrategy has already profited greatly ($225 million last I checked) from being an early adopter of #bitcoin as a savings technology.

I wonder if any central banks are observing these benefits of early migration to bitcoin…🤔

— Kyle Torpey (@kyletorpey) November 19, 2020

Both @Grayscale and @GenesisTrading seem to be collecting a growing number of billionaire clients recently…

— Barry Silbert (@BarrySilbert) November 18, 2020

Momentum to carry through

According to Sam Trabucco, a quantitative crypto trader at Alameda Research, there has been a combination of factors that drove BTC price higher, including lots of institutional buying, traditional buying by banks, hedge funds, random rich people, thought leaders, tech companies, Wyoming senators, etc. directly and indirectly — “whales,” outflows from faddish products back into BTC, influence from other markets, Joe Biden’s presidential victory, the vaccines, and FOMO.

As can be seen in the Bitcoin network, while the number of transactions remained fairly stable at around 2.1 million per week, the transactions have been larger.

According to ByteTree, whale dominance has risen along with the price during this recent uptrend, which tells us “the largest transaction quintile by value is rising relative to the lower four quintiles. The implication is that big money is entering the network, which is bullish.”

According to researcher Flipside Crypto, about 2% of the anonymous ownership accounts control 95% of the digital asset.

Besides the billionaires driving the price higher, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust, which is trading at a 20% premium, is behind this, along with the European Exchange Traded Products (ETPs) listed in Germany, Switzerland, and Sweden that is smaller than GBTC but growing rapidly.

Grayscale’s assets have grown more than 75% from the end of the quarter to surpass $10 billion. Michael Sonnenshein, managing director at Grayscale, told Reuters in an interview,

“While we’re only midway through the fourth quarter, I can certainly share that momentum has continued to carry through to the fourth quarter and probably accelerated a bit to what we have seen in Q3.”