
In a series of sharp price drops, the cryptocurrency markets have lost around 80% of their total value since the beginning of 2018. Although the causes of the crashes have been numerous and have remained a mystery, the jury is still not out. Reddit users suggested that the latest bitcoin crash, which saw it lose approximately 16% of its value in just four days, could have been due to investor concerns about a whale moving bitcoins from a wallet.
Silk Road
Silk Road, the notorious dark web store that sells everything from drugs and guns to steroids, has the address for the wallet.
Reddit posters calculate that the original wallet held bitcoins worth $844million. This is equivalent to roughly 111,114.62 coins of bitcoin and bitcoin cash. Reddit posters claim that the wallet’s owner moved 60,000 bitcoins in 100 coins chunks over the past two weeks. The wallet was last used for coin movement in March 2014. The wallet has been inactive for four years and finally started to show signs of activity. 2980 coins were moved to a Binance wallet, the largest crypto trading platform. The wallet’s owner also tried to hide his identity by moving the coins among multiple nodes.
Cryptocurrency Market
Can Bitcoin Whales Impact Cryptocurrency Markets? This is not the first time that Bitcoin whales have been blamed for the crash in cryptocurrency markets. Media reports claimed that former Mt. Nobuaki Kobayashi, Gox trustee, was responsible for the market crash earlier in the year. The market was on a bull run in December that culminated in bitcoin touching $20,000. Kobayashi later explained that he had sold the stock in chunks between December 2017 and February 2018 to avoid any impact on crypto prices. The cryptocurrency markets were bearish for most of January and February, as well as the rest of 2017. (See also: Bitcoin Bloodbath – $53 Billion Taken Off Crypto Market Cap). This has led to a loss in liquidity as investors sold their investments or moved them elsewhere. This could make them more vulnerable to manipulation.
Conclusion
CINDX CEO Yuri Adveev stated that the main problem in cryptocurrency markets at this stage is low liquidity. According to him, the rise in Tether, a stablecoin and the movement of large amounts from “large wallets”, has led to an increase in bitcoin prices. He said that such situations could lead to short-term losses for inexperienced participants in the market.