BTC increased to $20K marks an interesting correlation between the current bitcoin whale population and that of September 2017

Recently Bitcoin’s value has been quite fluctuating. The bellwether cryptocurrency dipped below $9k on June 15,alongside the US stock market which also took a plunge. However, only a few hours later, the cryptocurrency bounced back to as high as $9,500. This happened as a result of the announcement made by the Fed that it will begin purchasing individual corporate debt.
Throughout all this, the number of BTC addresses with massive value has been slowly increasing in recent months. According to Glassnode, the last time the current number of BTC whales was seen was in 2017 just before BTC soared to $20,000.
History repeats itself as of September 2017 before BTC pumped To $20,000
On June 15, a report was published by on-chain analytics firm Glassnode, reporting that number of addresses holding at least 1000 BTC has been growing since January of this year. At the moment, there are at least 1882 such bitcoin whales. Surprisingly, the analytics firm notes that they last witnessed such numbers in September 2017 as BTC surged to the $20,000 all-time high.
What’s more interesting for Glassnode is the fact that they first saw these many BTC whales in March 2016 while the cryptocurrency was still trading lower than $420. Now, the bitcoin price is now 20 times higher than it was back in March 2016, which indicates that the whales are now holding more money. Furthermore, Glassnode added;
the average balance held by each whale has decreased during this period, such that whales actually hold less BTC now than in 2016, and less wealth (in USD terms) than in 2017,
Whales impact on crypto markets
Whales have dominated the crypto market which is a sign of a healthy crypto-asset as it shows that the heavy investors are extremely confident about the price of BTC in the future and that is why they are investing. Thus BTC seems to have loyal large investors that have continued to accumulate since January despite the prevailing uncertain economic conditions.