• Whales and institutional players are doing silent accumulation during the recent BTC price consolidation.
• Large OTC deals on Coinbaise over the last week confirm institutional interest.
• We are still not close to the retail FOMO seen last in 2017.

Bitcoin (BTC) has once again given a 4% pullback surging past $58,000 and looking forward to breaking past its crucial resistance of $59,000. At press time, BTC is trading 4.12% up at $58,120 with a market cap of $1.086 trillion.

While Bitcoin has been trading flat over the last month and consolidating around $55,000, the big market fishes have been making the most of this opportunity. On-chain data provider Santiment brings interesting stats with whale behavior. Currently, there are 86 whale addresses holding over 10,000 Bitcoins.Over the last month, these whale addresses have accumulated over 120,000 Bitcoins, which is 0.67% of the total supply valued at $6.9 billion. Santiment notes that this has been the most sustained accumulation since July 2019.

Bitcoin (BTC) Exchange Outflows and OTC DealsWith Bitcoin (BTC) remaining under pressure amid the altcoin rally, retail investors have been skeptical of putting their money into it. But at the same time, institutional investors have been making big bets on BTC. Over the last week, there have been two major BTC outflows each of ~12K Bitcoins leading to bullish signs.

The first such outflow happened last Saturday on May 1. Another 12K BTC moved off Coinbase yesterday on Friday, May 7 as per data on CryptoQuant. Below is the chart of the number of Bitcoin transfers happening from the OTC desk wallets.

Another data from Galssnode shows that ‘sat stackers’ have been accumulating since 2018. Bitcoin addresses holding more than 1 BTC are nearly 5.25% of the total circulating supply. However, there’s yet not FOMO impulse like that of 2017.

All eyes are currently on the SEC approval of the first Bitcoin ETF in the U.S. Once it happens, regulators worldwide will open the gates of Bitcoin derivative products driving massive institutional inflows. Goldman recently started offering its Bitcoin derivative product to Wall Street investors.