Bitcoin Whale sold more than $1 billion in the last two weeks BTC: CryptoQuant Report

According to a report CryptoQuant shared with CoinDesk on Wednesday, long-term Bitcoin holders and miners have been the biggest sellers of the asset over the past two weeks, and there are few signs of a recovery. This trend can be observed by reducing the UTXO age band range, which indicates an increase in selling activity.

Some believe that miners may be shifting to the booming field of artificial intelligence (AI) due to reduced miner rewards after the halving, which may have increased sales activity.

Wallet data tracked by CryptoQuant shows that bitcoin whales, or large holders of a large number of tokens, have sold more than $1.2 billion worth of bitcoin in the past two weeks, most likely through brokers rather than the public market. "Etfs have negative net liquidity, with net outflows of $460m over the same period. If this approximately $1.6bn of seller liquidity is not bought into OTC, brokers may deposit BTC on exchanges, affecting the market."

"Traders are still not increasing their Bitcoin holdings, while demand growth from large holders (whales) remains anemic," the analysts wrote. "Liquidity for stablecoins continues to slow, growing at its slowest pace since November 2023."

These traders have reduced their holdings since bitcoin's price topped $70,000 at the end of May, as shown by the decline in the UTXO age band tracked by CryptoQuant.

Unspent Bitcoin transaction Outputs (UTXO) are created in every Bitcoin transaction and used by traders to track buying and selling patterns in past, present and future market cycles. A decline in the age of UTXO typically indicates an increase in Bitcoin activity and thus an increase in selling activity. A rise in age indicates an increase in holdings in the market.

"The big trend since Bitcoin halved this year is that miners are increasingly turning to AI businesses," Lucy Hu, senior analyst at Metalpha crypto Wealth Management, shared in a Telegram message. "The reduction in mining incentives has prompted miners to look for other channels to increase their revenue, and with AI companies' demand for energy-intensive data centers, bitcoin miners are gradually generating revenue by partnering with AI companies to sell."

Since June 5, the price of bitcoin has fallen from $71,000 to around $65,000 on Wednesday, mainly due to the strong dollar, the withdrawal of risky assets, and the growth of traditional stock indexes. Meanwhile, US-listed exchange-traded funds tracking the asset posted net outflows of more than $600m last week, their worst performance since late April.

Some traders warn that in the absence of a growth catalyst, the price could dip to $60,000.

Over the past 24 hours, BTC has fallen 0.6 percent, according to CoinDesk. CoinDesk 20 (CD20), a composite index that includes the 20 largest tokens, was up 1.2%.