Bitcoins accumulated by institutional investors

[ChrisPop]

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.

[carter34]

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

[teosanru]

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.

[o_e_l_e_o]

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.

[dothebeats]

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.

[Murat]

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.

[ChrisPop]

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.. 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.

[target]

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.

[Kemarit]

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.

[figmentofmyass]

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?

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.

[batang_bitcoin]

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

Also why wouldn't they split their holdings in multiple addresses instead of keeping them all in one?

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

1000 BTC is a big amount for a wallet but it could also be owned by an individual not an institution.

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.  

[LUCKMCFLY]

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.


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

[Kakmakr]

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.> 

[pixie85]

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.

[rdluffy]

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

[YuginKadoya]

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.

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,

What's your take on that? Also why wouldn't they split their holdings in multiple addresses instead of keeping them all in one?

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.

[franky1]

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

[pooya87]

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.

[CryptoBry]

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?

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.

[Shasha80]

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.