Bitcoin Investors Continue to Withdraw from Exchanges While Ethereum Balances Surge
As we have been seeing since Black Thursday, Bitcoin investors are choosing to HODL and store their bitcoin with themselves and remove their digital assets from cryptocurrency exchanges.
These bitcoin withdrawals from exchanges started with crypto derivatives platform BitMEX which suffered two DDoS attacks on the day of violent sell-off in March. Its web traffic in April also declined 40% to just under 8 million.
BitMEX’s BTC supply is now down 31.5% at 216.0K BTC, down from a peak of 315.7K on March 13th.
Bitfinex takes a hit
Initially, BitMEX recorded the highest decline but Bitfinex has taken even a bigger hit of 51.6%, as per the data provided by Coin Metrics.
From the high of 193.9k BTC on March 13th, Bitfinex now holds only 93.8k BTC.
Interestingly, just last week, a bitcoin whale on Bitfinex known as Joe007 vanished. On May 7, he deleted his account, leaving a farewell letter in which he described his time on Twitter as an “experiment” and also removed himself from Bitfienx Leaderboard.
Joe007 was the most profitable bitcoin trader in the past six months with $10 million gains recorded every month while Bitfienx realized a $25 million loss.
But Joe007’s gains led to a loss of $18.3 million after he shorted bitcoin at $6,800.
Currently, bitcoin is trading at $9,700, making its way to $10,000 once again after unable to maintain this level last week.
Halving didn’t have any effect on this trend
Binance was the only one that saw an increase in its BTC holdings as it captured BitMEX’s market share. Kraken’s didn’t see much change while Gemini’s BTC balance is recovering.
Interestingly, in the hours before or after bitcoin halving as well, this trend continued with the exchange net flow decreasing significantly.
“So far, the event has had no impact on 2020’s trend of investors withdrawing BTC from exchanges,” noted Glassnode.
In the exact opposite of the trend Bitcoin (BTC) balance on crypto exchanges is seeing, the amount of Ether (ETH) held on Bitfinex continues to climb to new highs.
As of May 10th, Bitfinex held over 5 million ETH.
While Krakeni’s ETH balance saw a small drop to 2 million, Bitstamp’s just under 1 million, Huobi’s resulted in the biggest decline from 5 million ETH to 4 million.
As Ether (ETH) price jumps above $200, its daily active addresses have taken a dip. This metric dropped off the past two times as well when Ether was trading in the $200-$215 range. However, the 6-month trend still looks “fantastic.”
A drop in daily active address and an increase in ETH transferred on the exchanges doesn’t speak well for the price of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
source: bitcoinexchangeguide.com
