Market Overview
With the 19 millionth Bitcoin mined, a renewed interest in Bitcoin as raw collateral by some large public buyers has been stimulated. In addition to the cryptocurrency small buyers and giant whales making extensive Bitcoin accumulations, it is worth mentioning Luna Foundation Guard, who boosted their holdings by over 21,000 Bitcoins in 9 days.
In fact, the Bitcoin market has seen numerous events recently, with large public buyers such as MacroStrategy and Luna Foundation announcing the completion of significant Bitcoin purchases. With a firm supply schedule and an eventual hard cap on Bitcoin supply, these events mark a new step towards Bitcoin being recognized by the market as an original collateral. And the price of Bitcoin has consolidated after a recent price rally.
In fact, the perception and application of Bitcoin as a financial collateral has been steadily growing. Luna Foundation Guard (LFG) was a major buyer last week, with the ultimate goal of using accumulated Bitcoin as backing for the UST algorithmic stablecoin. In addition, Wrapped Bitcoin (WBTC), inflows from Canadian ETFs (despite the massive macro and geopolitical risks and headwinds occurring globally), and general investor accumulation on the chain have all shown historical levels of strength, especially after the local price lows hit on January 22.
Bitcoin Milestone: 19 Millionth Bitcoin Mined
The total supply of Bitcoin recently reached 19 million, with just under 9.52% of the final supply remaining in the next few days. The current block height is 730,278, the total BTC supply is 19,001,529.68 BTC, and the daily issue is 918 BTC/day (14-day median basis).
Continued Historic Levels of Strong Holding
The recent trend in Bitcoin hoarding is impressive, with both retail buyers and the broader market increasing their positions.
Values close to 1 (purple) suggest that whales and most market entities are increasing their balances significantly. The current value returned is consistently above 0.65, suggesting that the market, in general, is showing a tendency to carry on accumulating.
At the same time, the exchange experienced a historically significant period of Bitcoin outflows of up to 96,200 coins/month. Outflows of this size are uncommon and have only happened a few times in history.
The continued high magnitude of Bitcoin outflows has caused the overall balance held by exchanges to reach a multi-year low. In March, more than 96,000 BTC flowed out of the exchanges tracked, reaching levels seen in August 2018, indicating a significant downward break from the overall high of exchange balances established in September 2021.
Specifically, most of the outflows are coming from the industry’s largest exchanges. Coinbase, Binance, Gemini, Kraken, Bittrex, and Bitstamp have all seen significant net outflows recently, although many of these exchanges have seen net balance growth over the past 12–24 months. Binance, in particular, has seen an explosive rise in the dominance of the exchange’s Bitcoin balance in 2021 but has had over 20,800,000 Bitcoin outflows in the past two weeks.
Major Bitcoin Supply Going Down
Over the past period of time, whale entities (with positions >1,000 Bitcoins) are accumulating large amounts of Bitcoins. One of the publicly available entities is Luna Foundation Guard (LFG), which has now accumulated 30,727 Bitcoins. in late January, LFG initially purchased 9,564 Bitcoins, which were then valued at $358.6 million, and now LFG’s balance has increased by 21,163 Bitcoins in 9 days. the total value of LFG’s balance is now over $1.4 billion dollars.
In recent years, there has been a steady trend of packaging Bitcoin into tokenized variants for deployment on other blockchains. More than 1.449% of Bitcoin supply (275,236 BTC) is now held by custodian BitGo and issued on the Ethereum blockchain in a tokenized version, WBTC. WBTC’s supply has increased by another 12,500 Bitcoins since the market low on January 22nd, with DeFi’s demand for Bitcoin collateral increasing despite the macro and geopolitical chaos.
Various Canadian ETFs have also seen significant inflows, with the Purpose ETF receiving the bulk of the inflows. Purpose ETF currently holds 35,000 Bitcoins and has seen a net inflow of 5,521 Bitcoins since the January 22nd price low. Total Bitcoin holdings have grown by a net 18.7% during this period amid macro and geopolitical turmoil. Purpose ETF now holds $1.627 billion in assets under management.
Summary and Conclusion
The Bitcoin market has seen a strong accumulation of historic levels lasting several weeks, and the sources are quite broad. Small buyers and giant whales have been the most aggressive accumulators of the recent past. Some large buyers such as LFG and MicroStrategy are re-emphasizing the significance of Bitcoin as raw collateral. Despite a plethora of headwinds, such as the conflict in Ukraine, rising commodity prices and shortages, and tightening monetary policy, demand for Bitcoin has generally strengthened among existing Canadian ETF products.
Overall, the market seems to have a new optimism about Bitcoin and its role in the future of the economy. The continued outflow of Bitcoin from exchanges and into self or assisted custody confirms these conclusions. As the 19 millionth Bitcoin is mined, the scarcity and originality of Bitcoin as collateral is likely to return to the forefront again.
TitanSwap Delivery
TITAN has been enhanced and updated to a certain extent at the technical level in addition to the daily maintenance to cope with the increasingly complex external environment changes. We added 2 new BSC nodes to synchronize the growing data of the BSC chain; at the same time, we optimized the back-end services, optimized memory fragmentation and memory recycling mechanism to improve peak data processing performance; solved some rare cases leading to the failure of limit order transactions; fixed the memory overflow problem when parsing specific transaction data.
