Bitcoin prices hit a 10-month low in the second week of March this year. Currently the cryptocurrency comes listed around $ 5.000, with a market capitalization of $ 96,16 billion and a 24-hour trading volume of $ 33,86 billion.
In times of high market volatility, whale movements have been carefully scrutinized as the mass movements of large deposits organized by this group have the power to influence prices and can create buying or selling trends. This group has been the subject of numerous studies and research.
Bitcoin whales
The number of wallet addresses with a BTC balance greater than or equal to 10k is generally greater than 100. In most cases, this figure has been inversely proportional to the Bitcoin price.
The same goes for wallet addresses with a balance greater than or equal to 1k BTC. In general, the management of portfolios of this size follows a curve inversely proportional to the action of Bitcoin prices, which means that the number of portfolio addresses that have a balance in the range between 1k and 10k decreases with the increase in value of the currency.
Interestingly, according to analyzes made on the Bitcoin blockchain by IntoTheBlock, there is only one whale that holds more than 1,40% of the total Bitcoin in circulation. At the time of writing, this whale had a balance of 255.502 BTC.
The concentration of large Bitcoin owners is 10,98% with 44 addresses. IntoTheBlock has divided large BTC holders between whales (addresses with more than 1% of the total BTC circulating offer) and investors (addresses that hold from 0,1% to 1,0% of the circulating offer). All other addresses have been considered retail.
Litecoin whales
For Litecoin, however, there are four whales that represent 1,16%, 1,18%, 2,52%, 2,55% of the total circulating supply of LTC. As for the concentration of large holders, there are 136 addresses with over 0,1% of the total supply in circulation, which control 46,16% of the total offer.
Of these, only 4 addresses that own 6,77% of the circulating supply have more than 1%. The largest has 2,55% of the offer with 1,64 million LTC or $ 66,94 million. The remaining 53,84% belongs to addresses with less than 0,1% of the outstanding offer of LTC.
This implies that in terms of concentration of ownership, the silver coin is more concentrated than its counterpart. In general, major cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Ethereum and Litecoin are still held by a small group of whales.
In another recent analysis that analyzed the distribution of the four cryptocurrencies BTC, ETH, LTC and BCH, Litecoin was found to be the one with the most concentrated wealth. The silver coin is among the first coins with the greatest disparity in wealth, so only 189 addresses have more than 50% of the total offer.
In addition, the 10 richest Litecoin accounts hold one tenth of all Litecoin's wealth.
