Bullish sign: Less BTC on exchanges – BTC withdrawn from Coinbase for $500m.
More than 12,000 Bitcoins worth about $500 million were recently withdrawn from Coinbase (and Tesla now accepts Bitcoin as payment!).
This follows a withdrawal of 30,000 Bitcoins in the last two days, bringing total Bitcoin Revolution reserves on exchanges to a new low of 2.3 million Bitcoin.
Less bitcoin on exchanges – a bullish sign
In total, more than 14,000 Bitcoins were withdrawn from tracked exchanges, including about 1,000 BTC from Binance and Bitfinex.
The 12,000 transaction in question came from a wallet funded in March 2018 with an initial deposit of 2,000 Bitcoins.
It then receives occasional top-ups, with the full amount now having been withdrawn.
Tracking the funding of this March 2018 address is a bit tricky as it goes through some obfuscation, but we have managed to land on the 1MMdVU address.
This is clearly an exchange address, and there’s confirmation that it’s Coinbase – presumably their hot wallet.
So we have a pretty confident picture here of Coinbase’s hot wallet funding the March 2018 cold wallet – and there is no reason to doubt the above.
Also, of course we know that this Cold Wallet has moved – but beyond that we don’t know much else.
It could well be that Coinbase itself moved it, for whatever reason, but in that case one would expect some systemic movement of coins.
However, Coinbase has set up sophisticated cold wallets that we know little about, so they can only move „parcels“ rather than their entire holdings.
Still, there is reason to believe that it is an actual withdrawal – especially because it is a very nice round number of $500 million and 12,000 bitcoins (to buy bitcoin via paypal guide).
Considering that there was also a dip, it is likely, though not certain, that someone bought this drop to the tune of half a billion.
Coinbase has previously revealed that they serve thousands of institutional investors and have executed numerous individual trades of $1 billion.
So holistically, these 12,000 bitcoins are probably one such purchase.