Who Just Bought 4% of All Bitcoin?

Yesterday, I wrote about JPMorgan’s view that the recent drop in BTC was driven by retail investors exiting their ETF positions. They even gave numbers: in November, retail sold around $4 billion worth of BTC and ETH spot ETFs. But today I came across new data, and it completely changes the picture.

Even if the entire $4 billion outflow came from BTC alone, that would mean ETF investors sold no more than about 60,000 BTC. Meanwhile, Bitcoin Magazine shows something far more dramatic: long-term holders have unloaded roughly 815,000 BTC over the past month. Long-term meaning those who held for 10+ years (the purple band on the chart). Funds don’t fall into this category — except maybe Grayscale.

So both the scale of the selling and the source of it are entirely different from what JPMorgan described. But my question from yesterday still stands: who on earth bought all of this?

And here’s where CryptoSlate’s observation becomes intriguing: in the last two months no new corporation has announced that it started buying Bitcoin.

So someone managed to acquire more than 4% of the entire Bitcoin supply in just one month. I have no idea who that buyer is, what their plans are, or what surprise they might be preparing for the market.