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Sometimes referred to as bitcoin’s “rich list,” the number of unique addresses holding more than 1,000 BTC has shrunk by over 8% since Feb. 8, according to the data provider Glassnode.

“Whale addresses have been selling,” market analyst Lark Davis tweeted. “This does not mean the bull run is over. It just means that profit taking is happening.”

On Wednesday, 2,275 addresses held at least 1,000 bitcoins, down more than 200 from Feb. 8’s record high of 2,488.

A single person or exchange can hold multiple addresses, leaving some doubt in the numbers. It’s possible the rise or fall in the number of addresses containing at least 1,000 coins does not necessarily represent an equivalent influx or outflux of large investors.

But a weakening of buying pressure from large investors would be consistent with other recent market indicators, including a decline in the so-called “Coinbase premium,” which theoretically indicates flagging institutional demand.

Bitcoin, however, has remained bid over the past 5.5 weeks, clocking new highs above $60,000, possibly on the back of increased retail participation.

Also read: Bitcoin Price Gets Fed Boost, but Bond Yields Could Play Spoilsport: Analysts

“The price since early January was predominantly retail, a fact highlighted by the [five times] more sign-ups on Binance compared to Coinbase,” Glassnode’s Uncharted newsletter, dated Feb. 27, said. Coinbase’s Coinbase Pro unit caters to larger, more sophisticated traders such as institutions and rich individuals.

The rich list grew during the May 2020-February 2021 period as whales vigorously accumulated the cryptocurrency.

Sometimes referred to as bitcoin’s “rich list,” the number of unique addresses holding more than 1,000 BTC has shrunk by over 8% since Feb. 8, according to the data provider Glassnode.

“Whale addresses have been selling,” market analyst Lark Davis tweeted. “This does not mean the bull run is over. It just means that profit taking is happening.”

On Wednesday, 2,275 addresses held at least 1,000 bitcoins, down more than 200 from Feb. 8’s record high of 2,488.

A single person or exchange can hold multiple addresses, leaving some doubt in the numbers. It’s possible the rise or fall in the number of addresses containing at least 1,000 coins does not necessarily represent an equivalent influx or outflux of large investors.

But a weakening of buying pressure from large investors would be consistent with other recent market indicators, including a decline in the so-called “Coinbase premium,” which theoretically indicates flagging institutional demand.

Bitcoin, however, has remained bid over the past 5.5 weeks, clocking new highs above $60,000, possibly on the back of increased retail participation.

Also read: Bitcoin Price Gets Fed Boost, but Bond Yields Could Play Spoilsport: Analysts

“The price since early January was predominantly retail, a fact highlighted by the [five times] more sign-ups on Binance compared to Coinbase,” Glassnode’s Uncharted newsletter, dated Feb. 27, said. Coinbase’s Coinbase Pro unit caters to larger, more sophisticated traders such as institutions and rich individuals.

The rich list grew during the May 2020-February 2021 period as whales vigorously accumulated the cryptocurrency.

If approved, the ETF would be the first open bitcoin exchange-traded product in the U.S., though there has long been demand for such a product from the crypto community. Historically, the SEC has rejected every bitcoin ETF application, including VanEck’s past efforts, citing the potential for market manipulation and a host of other concerns.

However, industry pundits believe the agency may finally be ready to approve one under incoming Chair Gary Gensler, a former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman who has been fairly bullish on crypto and blockchain, teaching courses on the technology at MIT in recent years.

VanEck filed for the ETF with Cboe BZX Exchange earlier this year, with Cboe publishing the 19b-4 at the beginning of March. Once the document is published in the Federal Register (the nation’s logbook), the general public will have 21 days to submit comments on the SEC’s portal.

The SEC can extend the review period up to 240 days before it has to make a final decision. When evaluating past applications, it has always extended these decisions to their full time limit.

A number of other companies, including Valkyrie and WisdomTree, have filed for bitcoin ETFs in recent months, after several applications were rejected in late 2019 and early 2020. Grayscale, a subsidiary of CoinDesk’s parent firm Digital Currency Group, recently posted a number of job listings for ETF specialists as well.

Recent ETF approvals in Canada may also hint an ETF is on its way in the U.S. Three have already begun trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange, marking the first North American bitcoin ETFs, with one seeing nearly $500 million in assets under management within its first few days.

If approved, the ETF would be the first open bitcoin exchange-traded product in the U.S., though there has long been demand for such a product from the crypto community. Historically, the SEC has rejected every bitcoin ETF application, including VanEck’s past efforts, citing the potential for market manipulation and a host of other concerns.

However, industry pundits believe the agency may finally be ready to approve one under incoming Chair Gary Gensler, a former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) chairman who has been fairly bullish on crypto and blockchain, teaching courses on the technology at MIT in recent years.

VanEck filed for the ETF with Cboe BZX Exchange earlier this year, with Cboe publishing the 19b-4 at the beginning of March. Once the document is published in the Federal Register (the nation’s logbook), the general public will have 21 days to submit comments on the SEC’s portal.

The SEC can extend the review period up to 240 days before it has to make a final decision. When evaluating past applications, it has always extended these decisions to their full time limit.

A number of other companies, including Valkyrie and WisdomTree, have filed for bitcoin ETFs in recent months, after several applications were rejected in late 2019 and early 2020. Grayscale, a subsidiary of CoinDesk’s parent firm Digital Currency Group, recently posted a number of job listings for ETF specialists as well.

Recent ETF approvals in Canada may also hint an ETF is on its way in the U.S. Three have already begun trading on the Toronto Stock Exchange, marking the first North American bitcoin ETFs, with one seeing nearly $500 million in assets under management within its first few days.

If approved, the ETF would be the first open bitcoin exchange-traded product in the U.S., though there has long been demand for such a product from the crypto community. Historically, the SEC has rejected every bitcoin ETF application, including VanEck’s past efforts, citing potential for market manipulation and a host of other concerns.

However, industry pundits believe that the agency may finally be ready to approve one under incoming Chair Gary Gensler, a former Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) who has been fairly bullish on crypto and blockchain, teaching courses on the technology at MIT in recent years.

VanEck filed for the ETF with Cboe BZX Exchange earlier this year, with Cboe publishing the 19b-4 at the beginning of March. Once the document is published in the Federal Register (the nation’s logbook), the general public will have 21 days to submit comments on the SEC’s portal.

The SEC can extend the review period up to 240 days before it has to make a final decision. When evaluating past applications, it has always extended these decisions to their full time limit.

A number of other companies have filed for bitcoin ETFs in recent months, after several applications were rejected in late 2019 and early 2020, including Valkyrie and WisdomTree. Grayscale, a subsidiary of CoinDesk’s parent firm Digital Currency Group, recently posted a number of job listings for ETF specialists as well.

Recent ETF approvals in Canada may also hint that one is on its way in the U.S. Three have already begun trading, marking the first North American bitcoin ETFs, with one seeing nearly $500 million in assets under management within its first few days.

Bitcoin’s price flipped to green after Federal Reserve officials on Wednesday reaffirmed their expectations to keep interest rates close to zero at least through 2023, potentially bolstering the cryptocurrency’s appeal as a hedge against faster inflation. 

As of press time, bitcoin was changing hands around $58,000, up from about $55,500 just before the Fed announced its decision around 18:00 coordinated universal time (2 p.m. ET). 

The price has doubled this year, partly because of demand from institutional investors who are looking for an asset that might hold its worth if the dollar’s purchasing power declines. Central banks around the world have pumped trillions of dollars of freshly created money into global financial markets to stimulate their coronavirus-wrecked economies.

Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley’s wealth management unit on Wednesday published a research report arguing the “threshold is being reached” for cryptocurrency to become an investable asset class. On the same day, Morgan Stanley said it will offer its clients exposure to three bitcoin funds, while Hong Kong-listed software firm Meitu made additional investments in bitcoin and ether.

“This is a bullish step to further awareness and acceptance of bitcoin, and shows the organic underlying demand as investors look to seek alternatives to existing investment classes,” said Jason Lau, chief operating officer at San Francisco-based crypto exchange OKCoin. 

Ether (ETH) was up on Wednesday, trading around $1,824.79 and climbing 2.24% in 24 hours as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).

“Ether and bitcoin are still moving tightly together,” OKCoin’s Lau said.

At the same time, the number of BTC locked in the Ethereum blockchain saw a sharp rise on Wednesday after dropping for more than a month, according to data from DeFi Pulse.

“The hypergrowth that markets exhibited earlier in the year, especially with ether, appears on the surface to have subsided, but the reality could not be any different,” Denis Vinokourov, head of research at trading sentiment data provider Trade the Chain, said. “Specifically, the number of bitcoin locked on Ethereum continues to rise and much of this capital eventually lands across the DeFi ecosystem.”

A handful of lesser digital assets rose sharply Wednesday after Grayscale announced plans for new trusts linked to Chainlink’s LINK, Decentraland’s MANA and a handful of others. (Digital Currency Group is the parent of Grayscale and CoinDesk and an investor in Decentraland.)

Bitcoin’s temporary failure to move higher since Saturday’s all-time high may have also pushed some investors and traders to alternative cryptocurrencies.

“While this might be unexciting for bitcoin traders, it has ether traders licking their lips at the prospect of the leading altcoin regaining some market share,” Adam James, senior editor at OKEx Insights, said. “Likewise, traders will also be looking for altcoins and DeFi governance tokens to capitalize on a bitcoin consolidation.”

Digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly in green Wednesday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET): 

Notable losers:

Equities:

Commodities:

Treasurys:

Bitcoin traded in a narrowed range as Monday’s sell-off appeared to subside and prices settled in the mid-$50,000 range for the most of Tuesday. 

Monday’s decline resulted in some $1.6 billion in derivatives bets being liquidated, second only to the record level that took place on Feb. 22, according to Norwegian blockchain analytics firm Arcane Research.

“But on Feb. 22, the relative price decline in bitcoin was larger than on this Monday.” Arcane wrote Tuesday in its weekly newsletter. “The extreme liquidation levels this Monday then suggests that this time around even more traders applied higher degrees of leverage in their trades.”

Bitcoin found strong support at $54,000, blockchain data shows.

Glassnode’s UTXO Realized Price Distribution (URPD), which charts bitcoins based on the price at which they were last moved, indicates that 865,000 BTC were moved around the $54,000 to $58,000 range as of March 15, according to Arcane.

At the same time, the all-time high price above $61,000 reached on Saturday appears to have alleviated some chart-following analysts’ concerns the market might be forming a “double top.”

Double tops are an extremely bearish price chart pattern. After bitcoin pushed out new all-time highs in January and February, traders fretted over the possibility of a double top then, too, according to Annabelle Huang, partner at Hong Kong-based market maker Amber Group.

“The weekend breakthrough has lifted some of those pressures,” Huang said.

Ether (ETH) was down Tuesday, trading around $1,784.90 and sliding 0.28% in 24 hours as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).

“Ether is currently struggling to push higher,” Arcane Research wrote. “Investors are getting impatient as the second-largest cryptocurrency hasn’t been able to surpass its all-time high from Feb. 20, while bitcoin has continued to new highs.”

Ether’s spot trading volume also has been flat, according to data from eight major spot crypto exchanges CoinDesk tracks.

The trading volume was nearly $3 billion on Feb. 20, when ether broke above $2,000 for the first time, followed by several volatile days with daily trading volume as high as around $5.4 billion. Yet, when ether was trying to eke out a new all-time high on March 13, trading volume was only about $1.6 billion.

By using the DeMarker Indicator, a charting tool that’s used to measure the demand of the underlying asset, ether “is flashing a short-term ‘sell’ signal,” said Katie Stockton, a technical analyst for Fairlead Strategies.

“A two-week consolidation phase appears likely, at the minimum,” Stockton said. And the “recent volatility has left the first key support for ether back below $1,300, dictating extra attention to risk management.”

Cardano, meanwhile, which aspires to rival Ethereum as a “smart-contract” blockchain, saw a double-digit percentage gain in the past 24 hours after the cryptocurrency exchangeCoinbase Pro announced that it would support trading in the token.

Digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mixed Tuesday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET):

Notable losers:

Equities:

Commodities:

Treasurys:

The Pantera prediction is based on the stock-to-flow model – an analytical framework that values an asset’s price based on its annual issuance schedule. The model measures the scarcity of bitcoin (BTC), which is governed by the underlying network programming coded into the blockchain’s design when it was launched 12 years ago.

Under that plan, the number of new bitcoin created with each new data block, every 10 minutes or so, gets cut in half roughly every four years. In theory, according to the stock-to-flow model, the bitcoin price should rise as the issuance rate declines.

Morehead’s predictions carry weight partly because of his prior Wall Street experience: Before founding Pantera in 2003, he served as head of macro trading for the hedge fund Tiger Management, and before that he worked as a trader at Deutsche Bank and Goldman Sachs.

Bitcoin on Monday suffered its biggest single-day price decline in more than two weeks, after the fizzing of a retail trader-driven rally over the weekend that analysts said was notable for its lack of participation by institutional investors. 

At press time, bitcoin’s price was changing hands around $56,671.15 after it tumbled to $54,790.33 during Asian trading hours earlier Monday, down 11% from Saturday’s record high at $61,556.59.

Read more: Nearly $40B in US Stimulus Checks May Be Spent on Bitcoin and Stocks: Mizuho Survey 

“This sell-off happened right around the start of trading hours in Asian capital markets,” John Willock, chief executive at digital asset exchange Blocktane, said. “So it is likely that traders there repositioned themselves for the start of the week, post run-up.”

According to data from crypto derivatives analytics site Skew, bitcoin futures open interest on major retail platforms reached new all-time highs over the weekend. On the institution-driven CME’s bitcoin futures contract, however, open interest was lower compared with levels at the end of February, when bitcoin’s price pierced $58,000 for the first time.

“The fresh all-time high on Saturday above $60,000, coupled with the closure of traditional markets that has recently kept bitcoin yoked, meant a hopeful chase by retail participants,” Singapore-based quant firm QCP Capital wrote in its weekly market update on March 15. Funding rates on bitcoin perpetual futures – the fees traders pay for the leverage embedded within the trading instruments – rose to 200% on an annualized basis, considered an “unsustainable” level, according to QCP.

The lack of support from institutional investors in the recent rally was also apparent from the so-called Coinbase premium. The indicator, as tracked by the South Korean blockchain data-analysis firm CryptoQuant, measures the spread between Coinbase’s BTC/USD pair and Binance’s BTC/USDT pair. Over the weekend, it went negative, implying weak institutional demand.

Read more: DeFi Projects Cream Finance, PancakeSwap Hit With ‘DNS Hijacks’ 

That dynamic contrasted with the apparent surge in institutional participation during a rally last month. 

After bitcoin broke above key psychological levels at $30,000 in January and $50,000 in February, the Coinbase premium saw huge jumps, showing a strong follow-up demand from institutions, according to Du Jun, co-founder of crypto exchange Huobi.

Trading volume during the rally over the past few days was muted, based on data from eight major spot crypto exchanges tracked by CoinDesk. It was nothing like the surge in volume that came with last month’s price swings.

Ether (ETH) was down on Monday, trading around $1,789.53 and sliding 4.13% in 24 hours as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET).

The No. 2 cryptocurrency by market capitalization is still largely driven by bitcoin’s price action.

The ether-to-bitcoin ratio dropped to near 0.030 since the weekend, after it rose to 0.046 in the beginning of February, the highest since August 2018.

Read more: ‘Analysis Ongoing’: Nifty Gateway Addresses NFT Security Concerns

“Ether, taking cue from bitcoin, failed just under the huge $2,000 spot level,” QCP wrote in the market updates. “We expect it to largely underperform bitcoin from here.”

Similar to bitcoin, ether’s spot trading volume remained flat after it spiked in late February – a low-volume price rise is usually short-lived.

On the derivatives market, ether futures contracts open interest on major exchanges – although higher to around $6.3 billion – was not nearly as high as the $7.1 billion level during ether’s last big rally to about $2,000.

Digital assets on the CoinDesk 20 are mostly in red Monday. Notable winners as of 20:00 UTC (4:00 p.m. ET): 

Notable losers:

Equities:

Commodities:

Treasurys:

“We are modeling out about $175,000 for the price of bitcoin by the end of this year,” Byworth said on Monday during an interview with Bloomberg.

The bull run is still in its early stages, he said, adding “things are going to get a lot more heated from here.”

The top cryptocurrency by market value is trading near $57,940 at press time, having hit a record high of $61,556.59 on Saturday, according to CoinDesk 20 data. Prices have rallied by 500% since early October.

According to Byworth, the Federal Reserve’s massive money printing program and the devaluation of the dollar is having a “push effect onto bitcoin.” The top cryptocurrency by market value is further facing a supply crisis due to the miners reward halving in May 2020 (which halved the issuance of new units) and increased institutional participation, he said.

“We are starting to see institutional adoption to a degree that is so extreme, that you’ve got four companies – MicroStrategy, Tesla, Square and now recently Meitu – owning 40% of bitcoin’s annual supply in just a few months,” Byworth said.

Also read: The Case for $1M Bitcoin

Speaking about potential risks to the bullish price outlook, Byworth said an early unwinding of stimulus by the U.S. Federal Reserve “would put a bit of a [damper] on things.”

Markets recently started pricing in a shift in the timing of the first Fed interest rate hike to the end 2022 from 2024. However, according to Byworth, the U.S. central bank has little room to unwind stimulus, as the longer-term technological backdrop is deflationary.

When quizzed about regulators’ concerns about the blockchain technology’s anonymity factor, Byworth said that “bitcoin isn’t anonymous, and can be tracked very very easily.”