Bitcoin Forum

I have just seen this tweet from glassnode on Twitter which shows that the number of addresses that hold over 1000 BTC has dramatically increased in the last year and a half. Pretty much since we have dropped from the $6000 level the BTC has started to be accumulated. Are they institutions? What's your take on that? Also why wouldn't they split their holdings in multiple addresses instead of keeping them all in one?

Looking at the graph we are approaching 2100 addresses with > 1000 BTC, that translates to at least 2,100,000 BTC.

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EGm0jBqWkAIBYDz?format=jpg&name=small

Are there really a need to keep same coin in different addresses?
The reason is that, the secret keys can be lost or miss placed and can't be found anymore. That simply means losing the coin. Also, bitcoin is not held in secret just like politicians hide public monies (fiat) in different accounts so that if one is traced, the others might not be found by the public or investigating agencies

Well irony is when the facts clearly say that whales are getting bigger and bigger using market manipulation people still think that we are moving towards more even distribution. I don't think there is any even distribution happening around. There is still a pretty wide gap between the early adopters and the late adopters and taking in consideration the current scenario of market manipulation i highly doubt that this thing is going to improve any time soon.

The vertical lines suggest this is simply one person/company/organization/institution splitting their coins over multiple addresses, rather separate entities accumulating more coins.

There is a vertical jump of 200 addresses towards the end of 2018. If that was due to multiple entities, then it would have happened over days to weeks at least, and we wound see a steep, but certainly not vertical, line. The fact that there were 200 new addresses all holding >1000 BTC all appear at once very strongly suggests this was a large entity who was splitting their coins up over the course of a couple of transactions at most, most probably for security reasons, rather than keeping many thousands of bitcoin in the same address.

You can see other periods of growth that look far more normal such as at the start of 2016.

Or it could be that a lot of exchange platforms are diversifying their assets into different hot and cold wallets in order to minimize the risk of having their balances emptied in one fell sweep. But yeah, it's not really a secret that every time the price falls, loads of people are buying bitcoins in order to gain some profit, though the reason why the richy rich are keeping them in one huge chunk is still unclear.

I think of a few reasons -

* Security
* Managing funds for customers.
* Big institutions selling to big investors & 1000 Bitcoin minimum.

I don't really think because of security because they would be using a hardware wallet. More like they are managing funds for big investors. I could be wrong but this is more likely the reason for it.

Well.. if they use a hierarchical deterministic wallet they can access a large number of addresses with the same mnemonic phrase or seed phrase. They could split the Bitcoins in different addresses to minimise the risk also and store the private keys in different places so if one got stolen you still remain with the other ones.

There are people monitoring btc addresses which tend to send message to them either by email or text when large amount of BTC is being moved, it being moved means it could be dumped. 1000 BTC is a big amount for a wallet but it could also be owned by an individual not an institution. Or they the really divide their coins to several btc wallets to protect themselves from not getting all the amount by criminals.

I believed that institutional investors have been accumulating BTC for a long time, even pre 2016 and evidently in 2017 wherein we reached our peaked that December. Obviously, when you hold so much Bitcoin you have to split it in several wallets for security purposes. In a event of a breach or hack only one wallet would be affected. I guess it's a norm for huge bag holders around, or even average joes do that practice as well so there's no secret in there and could be considered as best practice in crypto community.

maybe they are splitting them up. all we know is those coins are sitting in lots of 1000+ BTC. we don't know how many entities control them.

it does look like large scale accumulation but for all we know, it could just be exchange cold storage or something. we would need a more in depth analysis to get a better idea.

We don't know if they are from the institutions but it's likely it is.

This could be their cold storage and prefer not to touch them for safekeeping.

Both are always of a possibility that an individual is keeping huge amount of bitcoin and prefer to stay lowkey or it could be those 'experts' that gets attention by giving their analysis to the market.  :P

Well in some articles they claim that the biggest Holders are the Exchanges, they are the ones that have the most Bitcoin accumulated, I imagine that it is because of the large number of negotiations that take place.

The Exchanges have the advantage of seeing where the supports and resistances are, a good movement that they do internally is enough to hunt the Stops of many traders and buy cheap bitcoins.

The business of the Exchanges is very lucrative, they usually have many packages that they offer to those who want to list coins, from there you can make profits to obtain Bitcoins.

https://i.imgur.com/3PdqebZ.png
Source: https://twitter.com/thetokenanalyst/status/1181618606649548800
Here you can see: https://docs.tokenanalyst.io/#bitcoin-exchange-balance

The nicest feature of Bitcoin is it's pseudo anonymity, so we can speculate as much as we want to on who the owners of those addresses are, but we will never know who it is.  ;)  In all likelihood this will change over time, because more and more people are starting to use services with KYC/AML requirements and the flow of bitcoins would be possible with these services.  >:(

For all we know, this might just be a couple of whales sorting their whole hoard into more manageable bundles and not institutional investors entering the Bitcoin scene. <Most institutional investors are not allowed to trade people's money on unregulated investment tools.>  ::)

I also think that these are exchanges or funds managing bitcoin investments for people. Even things like MtGox bankruptcy case managed by that Japanese guy had to keep a lot of money on single addresses but these were not money belonging to a single millionaire.

I also don't think these are institutional investments. 1000 bitcoins on a single address is an impressive thing but it becomes much less impressive when you find out that it belongs to 3000 people.

It's interesting to know about these adresses

I don't think it makes any difference abou the security because with so many BTC, they probably have a strong security to keep them safe

Well, all I think was everything is possible but we are speculating that this 1000 BTC owner was 1 person or it can be owned by multi-person as well so the number of whales is multiplying it can be a fact but if anyone can see the IP address of that Bitcoin address and place it here it is much appreciated for peeps that have a question mark in the back of their mind this can be a big help to take out their thinking in these issue,


And for OP don't think so much it is their decision to split their own bitcoin we are all speculating and you just came out to wonder why there are multiple addresses that have 1000 BTC on it, it can be a coincidence or it can also be from one man, However, if it is just one man can he really memorized all that private key for that addresses, Or he can have one private key for all of them, well anyway this can be all speculation if someone would not expose that IP address.

things i can see from the charts

the top chart of the topic shows 2100 addresses of MINIMUM1k coins. meaning WAY MORE than 2.1mcoins are hoarded in 2100 addresses
according to https://btc.com/stats/rich-list ~7mill coins are hoarded in addresses ofmore than 1000coins


separetly the other chart about known exchange holdings only shows 1.2m are hoarded by known exchange addresses
this means out of 7mill coins.. known exchanges are only hoarding under 20% of it

it also reveals many other things
many people are depositing into exchanges but not that many are withdrawing out. just look at the smooth upcurve on the exchange chart.
with only small waves of dips that dont seem to counter the upcurve by much

in addition to what o_e_l_e_o said, this could also show the growth of adoption. you see adoption is in different forms. one of it is when more people start trading bitcoin (more speculators) which translates into more people being on exchanges, buying and selling bitcoin. more traders means more coins in the pocket of exchanges which is their cold storage (keeping on behalf of their clients) and that increases their balance by a lot.

Whoever own those Bitcoin must be concerned with the security that is why they use multiple addresses rather than a single one though some will not be agreeing with this measure. The increase of the number of addresses holding over 1000 Bitcoin can be explained in  lot of scenarious but we are just actually speculating here. Yes, this can mean more new users getting into Bitcoin or just old members of the gang adding more Bitcoin holdings. We are all dreaming that Bitcoin be evenly distributed to as much people as possible and not just concentrated on the so-called whales but we know that economic realities are coming in to the picture. We are no more at the beginning phase where the coins can be spread by means of maybe a faucet or an airdrop. Right now, though, I am really wondering if there would be effective ways we can do so that more and more people all over the world can be participating in the Bitcoin revolution.

One of the advantages of bitcoin is that it is transparent, meaning that all bitcoin movements can be read on the blockchain. This way we can make predictions about the direction of bitcoin movement, now there is a lot of news about 1000 BTC movements are around 2100 addresses. This is great news because 1000 BTC is the amount which is huge if it is personally owned, I'm sure that many BTCs must be owned by the institution. If like this is the case means there is a large institution behind it all, which if many start holding bitcoin. Moreover, the institution will definitely move the price of bitcoin significantly. Means this is a good sign that in the near future bitcoin will surge up, this is a great opportunity to invest for those who have not yet bought. And if you already buy, you can hold bitcoin.

They use multiple adress because they believe if they put them all in one adress, people will know they are big holder in Bicoin. Maybe they are the real whales who try control price. So if we see now the price Bitcoin is still cheap than last year, they will try buy as much as possible.
I think they try make Bitcoin to dip.
That is maybe not only Bitcoin, they also hold some altcoin.

I think it's being split between 3 parties. Rich companies that want to get into crypto-currencies, trust fund operators that are starting to see that cryptocurrencies are a viable investment option, and other rich crypto traders that want to take advantage of the low price.

There's the ego factor, a lot of whales like to keep their currencies in a single wallet to show-off they have that much money, understandable.

The rationale for splitting in different wallet I.e if this is own by a single institution/entity would be for security reasons, the fear of getting hacked and having all the coins in one wallet, it will  be better to split them in different wallet, that seems to be a more logical reason,  

but idea of not wanting people to know they are whales is more of a joke,  I mean for any one to hodl 1000 btc in a wallet already has the mark of a whale, people already know they are in control of the market, there is no need to hide.

maybe bitcoin investors don't send bitcoin to one bitcoin wallet maybe because they doubt the security of their bitcoin wallet so they send bitcoin to several bitcoin wallets because bitcoin wallets don't promise very safe security for users, imagine how sad they would be if they lost a bit of their bitcoin.

There are two possibilities its either it is a big financial institution who have a huge capital that takes interest on bitcoin and started hoarding. The second is possibly it is the exchange itself that is just transferring their bitcoin holdings to certain addresses to make it more secure or for whatever reason why they did it. But I am hoping that it is the first thing I mentioned since when big companies and institutions entered cryptocurrency and bough a huge amount of bitcoins the amount of bitcoins in the exchanges becomes lesser and that would mean a high chance of the value climbing up.

I think this is a way of concealing wealth, It is very possible that there is only one owner or if it is owned by a group of hackers or scamers,
There are many reasons but I can only say that it is closer to the answer or the truth is that it is a way of hiding so that no one knows how rich its owners are. Or it is a security that the Bitcoin held by owner does not steal everything immediately.

I agree with o_e_l_e_o about the chart. It does look more like diversification than accumulation. In the case of accumulation we'd probably see the decrease in the number of less wealthy addresses and a small increase in the number of rich addresses. Adding quite a lot of rich addresses so fast indeed suggests that it's an operation of diversification performed by one or perhaps up to 3 companies (or 3 structural components on the company) methodically at specific dates. This should be indicated by a tiny decrease in the number of super-rich addresses during those days, but I don't know how to check such a thing.

Probably yes probably not, there is no data or news that can tell us that those coins really owned by  institutional investors may be some whales decided to create additional wallets and distribute to these additional wallets unless we can trace on who owns the majority of these wallets that now holds over 1000 Bitcoin, and I don't see any bad reason why people will split their shares so many people are already doing this, and it's like not putting all your eggs in one basket.  

One of the feature of bitcoin is being anonymous so as long as your wallet is not associated with any business who deals with KYC procedure, your wallet is safe to be known in public., It seems that there's a chance of institutional investors who learned crypto as a good store assets to invest for longer term of holdings. Or possible that bag holders who splitting his assets to multiple wallets. Whatever it is, we don't have any chance to know since anonymity is there to prevent us knowing the real owners of those wallets

In my opinion this is because more entrepreneurs and investors are protecting their money in Bitcoin and they have purchasing power, somehow they have taken advantage of low prices and the accumulation has been great, the most important thing is that the benefits of technology Blockchain and cryptocurrencies achieve a practical and massive use.

It's very easy to comprehend, so simple the price of bitcoin reduced and this made is easier for investors to getore and more, the bear market was not all that completely a disaster it just a time to get extra bitcoin

Probably an instition and maybe some of them are also businesses that are using Bitcoins. As time goes by, it is really expected that we can see an enourmous increase on different Bitcoin addresses that has Bitcoin balance, especially what the OP said ,the more than 1,000 BTC balance on different wallet addreses. Price + adoption, is the formula for that, that's why.

I think that it is indeed being accumulated by institutionalized investors like businesses that involves bitcoin. Actually this isn't sound good for it does't shows adoption for these btcs only belongs to few individuals and not distributed to different addresses. Likewise, we don't have enough power to control those whales in the market who are indeed manipulating it. Maybe they are the ones who was there from the beggining of cryptos.

I don't really add too much value to wallet balances because whales more than ever tend to reduce the risk of holding a lot of coins in one address by distributing their coins amongst a multitude of wallets.

I'm a small fish but I have distributed my coins amongst multiple wallets too, and with me there are a lot of other people who did so. This mass movement of coins to the clueless people might appear to be mass adoption.

No doubt there are new investors entering the space, but news outlets always like to exaggerate every metric to make it appear that there is a lot going on in crypto land, while the reality isn't all that exciting at all.

I think there's a possibility here where it's not actually 2000 or so different entities/whales, but some of the addresses could just be owned by one really rich person who spreads out his funds... Just a theory though.

No doubt there been more institutional investments in the market in recent years, a lot of trust funds and venture capital funds have started looking at this market and there was a study that showcased that more traditional investors where starting to flow into our markets.

The more companies and influential people hold and showcase their support for crypto, the better.

Long back itself this is being practiced by the centralized Institutional investors who are against cryptocurrency. They give an outlook of opposing the cryptocurrencies and hold it indirectly. This means they're in need of bitcoin, because no asset is volatile to this extent.

When large volume fund gets accumulated in the form of bitcoin, the change in price will get a big return. This will help them overcome losses in a much easier way if something worse has taken place in their business. Particularly insurance firms are much into accumulation of bitcoin.

It's possible that some institutions already hold bitcoin in them, maybe they're just hiding it and not broadcasting it to the public. I don't think these institutions would just let bitcoin exist and does not care to hold at least some. This also signifies that bitcoin is still early and that there is demand that would keep bitcoin alive in the next years or more. It's not just another get-rich-quick scheme, I believe that it would become mainstream soon, the blockchain and cryptocurrencies have promising advantages and characteristics that'll attract more investors.

I think this is more of a thing Where it depends who do you call an institution ..
It may just be a person with a lot of money considering how many billionaires are there.. we cannot just say that it's an institution also at the same time when we think the black market have a lot of people with unlimited cash they would also be here so I think it more of a  sum , not just institutions , because they fear the government ... They are tied by it .. they will try and stay away from things that would be troublesome for them .

at this time I am sure investors who still keep a lot of bitcoin even more than 1000 Bitcoin are still very much and this also does not know whether the owner is still alive or not because usually investors who have that much bitcoin can no longer access their wallet, if can still access his wallet so he can definitely get a lot of benefits.

It is not surprising that people are accumulating bitcoin because we have another halving next year and everyone knows the history of bitcoin as it is really short and when ever there is a halving we tend to see a rally and everyone is expecting that this time too, there might be institutional investors and there may be millionaires or billionaires taking a risk to make profit.

Splitting the coins in different wallets will be a wise idea to avoid any risk but the fact remains that if your system is compromised then you are doomed and if you know what you are doing then it does not matter.

If this trend is gonna be an institutional issue then it would be a good thing from my perspective, this type of big bulk holding is not good for this platform because of Bitcoin is yet to be a mature platform, so when you see that a big syndicate then you might think that there is a big target behind this, Suppose when the price of Bitcoin will get a high line then they would probably sell of their whole stocks and then instantly the price will be hampered again, So I think everwhere is syndicate is not brought any positive outcome. Institutional or non-institutional, that's not my concern, the reserve is the main concern for me because of its a currency, not gold.

The time that the bears spend in the market may be discouraging, but to a degree, it is actually a blessing because it will make us be able to buy the coin at cheap price and then sell at high price anytime that the market is fully bullish.

This is one thing that makes institutional investors to always be wiser than us, anytime that they see some of those opportunities to buy bitcoin at a cheap price, they go for it and accumulate as much as they can while we are the ones that use to panic sell, but  if we are wise, we should already understand that rather than panicking, we should try to always take advantage of the deep price to always had more coin to our pocket in preparation to when bitcoin will fully start rising in the future when the bull run starts.

It's trivial to generate a few hundred to thousand addresses, then use those to split up what would otherwise be a very large quantity of coins in a single address. They could even use one of those wallets or hardware wallets with HD to create a master extended public key and have a thousand addresses of cold storage.

Not every address that you see actually belongs to institutional investors because we have so many people in cryptocurrency that are very rich individually and many people keep money in bitcoin for different purposes, some keeps it for Investment, some for transactions and some even keeps it in their wallet against the eyes of the government.

Institutional investors that hold bitcoin even have more than that 1000 btc in their wallet, and talking of splitting into different address, I see no reason why they should do that when they don’t have hidden agenda, and they might have even done that by splitting it the way you see. What if an institutional investor has about 10,000 btc altogether and the splitting is what you have already seen as 1000 each?

It looks like it can be a mix of both institutional investors, big lone whales and also exchanges. If you have noticed there are a plethora of new cryptocurrency exchanges opening up every month, so naturally, they will be housing some good number of Bitcoin in their hot and cold wallets for their customers. So although I do believe that institutional investment into the Bitcoin Asset Class has been going up steadily, I also think that OTC DESKS and Exchanges have also been cropping up in numbers as well. The big birds are for sure eating up all the little Bitcoin worms now. I want to see if more and more smaller holders will be popping up, as we want more decentralization to happen and this can only happen if we have many Bitcoin holders.

It's quite un likely to spot the big maeket change due to investors only, though it is in fact true that there are many whales in the crypto space. But I see, another contributor to this phenonmenon are those bitcoin casinos and sports betting platforms that needs more fund to operate. In addition l, more and more mobile wallets and exhnages are now opened for massive crypto adoption in the latter future.