Another shocker was received by the crypto market when it was still suffering from FTX and Luna crashes. On Wednesday, 23rd November 2022, News surged that more than 10k BTC was transferred from 7 years old failed BTC-e Exchange to HitBTC. You might think that what is the relationship between transferring 10k Bitcoins and a bearish market? But there is one that is more dangerous than you can imagine.
According to crypto experts when such a large amount of BTC is transferred at once, they try to sell them at once and if they do it this time, the BTC market may fall below $10k. This would be more dangerous than most people can even think of. However, you may argue that why would they do this at 16k BTC while they had ample opportunity during the bull run, 30-69k?
The answer is simple: if they sell at a $16k price they will still get more than 55X profit because these coins were bought in Jan 2015 when the price of BTC was a mere $297. And today it stands at $16k which is approx. PnL is 5,594%. The news of these transferred Bitcoins came to the limelight when two unidentified accounts sent 10k BTC worth 165 million dollars from BTC-e.
What was BTC-e?
The BTC-e was one of the top crypto exchanges till 2014 but it was rubbed with more than 744,408 BTC and was then immediately shut down. Its operator, Alexander Vinnik, was arrested in 2017 in this case and nothing came out of this case since then. All of its funds were seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2017 after so many allegations of money laundering and fraud.
However, according to Chainalysis, at the time of shutting down it still had sub “a substantial amount of Bitcoin,” Additionally, it had more than 30k Bitcoins in its service which were moved out from the service in April 2018.
Timing of transaction
The timing of the transaction is very critical because the crypto industry is suffering from the latest debacles of the FTX and Luna crash and it might affect the overall sentiments of the crypto users and investors. In this case, 300 bitcoins were sent from a wallet that received 3,500 to another wallet around 08:38 UTC. Those funds were split further and landed in several wallets that could not be linked to any known custodial service.
However, there is another optimistic group of investors and crypto users that view this transaction from another perspective. The wallet owner may have sent the money directly to the wallet a person can deposit money into another wallet of their own, send it to another individual, or cash out through an unofficial over-the-counter broker. The remaining 6,500 stayed put.
The same sentiments were shared by a crypto user on Twitter and the co-founder and CEO of cryptoquant.com, Ki Young Ju replied that “I’m not saying they’re going to sell all those 10k Bitcoins. We never know when they will sell the rest of the BTC. What we do know is that 10k BTC was moved by criminals and could be potential sell-side liquidity since they sent 0.6% of their assets to exchanges.”
Additionally, he urged the HitBTC platform to suspend the transaction of these unidentified accounts in order to put a hold on further selling of these Bitcoins.
Final thoughts
Every morning the crypto news industry receives some bad news regarding the crypto market and you can see the overall impact of that news on the market. The market is bearish from last year due to shreds of bad news. If this trend continued, we might see a very bad crypto future, however, such critical situations are not new to the crypto industry.
