Bitcoin whale who held for 7 years sells $76M to go long on Ether

A major Bitcoin whale who has diamond-handed Bitcoin for the last seven years has sold off some of its bag to open a long position in Ether, joining a recent wave of Bitcoin whales opening up to Ethereum. 

The OG whale sold 670 Bitcoin (BTC) for $76 million on Wednesday, then used those funds to go long across four positions, totaling 68,130 (ETH), Lookonchain said in an X post on Thursday.

Before the sale, the whale had 14,837 Bitcoin worth over $1.6 billion, dating back to purchases from crypto exchanges Binance and HTX over seven years ago.

It comes only a week after Bitcoin reached a new all-time high of $124,128 on Aug. 14, and Ether came close to reclaiming its 2021 all-time high of $4,878.

Source: Lookonchain

Whale positions went down after buy

All four of the whales’ Ether positions were opened around the $4,300 mark, according to Lookonchain, and the bulk of the Ether is on 10x leverage, while a smaller position of 2,449 is on 3x leverage.

However, after the whale opened their positions on Wednesday, Ether's price dropped, hitting a low of $4,080, putting three into the red and only about $300 away from the liquidation prices of $3,699, $3,700 and $3,732.

Ether is trading up 2.9% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko, and is currently changing hands for $4,287 per token.

Institutions stacking Ether too

A trio of whales’ panic sold 17,972, 13,521 and 3,003 Ether during a market dip on Tuesday, Lookonchain said, but others were waiting in the wings to snap it up. 

At the same time, two institution-linked wallets were stacking Ether, accumulating 9,044 each worth $38 million, according to Lookonchain.  

Source: Lookonchain

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a publicly traded Bitcoin company, also added another 52,475 Ether to its treasury, bringing its holdings to 1.52 million tokens worth $6.6 billion.

Old whales moved their Bitcoin bags last month as well

Meanwhile, two other Bitcoin whales also moved large amounts of Bitcoin last month, but didn’t buy Ether. 

A Satoshi-era Bitcoin whale with 80,201 tokens started shifting its holdings to Galaxy Digital after being dormant for 14 years, making the final transfer on July 16.

Related: Ether trader turns $125K into $43M, locks in $7M after market downturn

After six years of dormancy, another smaller whale woke on the same day and transferred out 1,042 Bitcoin, worth $123 million, to a new wallet.

Crypto analyst Willy Woo said in June that whales with more than 10,000 Bitcoin have been steadily selling since 2017, answering an X user’s question about who has been selling amid heightened interest from institutions.

However, analysts told Cointelegraph OG Bitcoiners that selling their holdings is nothing to worry about because new buyers are jumping in, which is a good sign of a maturing market. 

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