The large crypto investor, who emerged two months ago with around $11 billion worth of Bitcoin, has nearly $900 million in short positions in Bitcoin and Ether, signaling expectations for a market correction despite widespread optimism for October.
The whale returned to trading on Thursday with a $360 million Bitcoin (BTC) transfer, piqued the interest of crypto investors, Cointelegraph reported.
On Friday, whales opened $600 million worth of 8x leveraged short positions in Bitcoin and more than $300 million worth of leveraged short positions in Ether (ETH), according to blockchain data platform OnChainLens.
The large short bets indicate whales’ confidence in the upcoming correction, but this theory could be invalidated if Bitcoin price rises above the liquidation threshold of $133,760.
sauce: on-chain lens
Whale also opened a $330 million 12x leveraged short position in Ether with a liquidation price of $4,613. According to blockchain data shared by Lookonchain on Friday, this position represented an unrealized gain of $2.6 million at the time of writing.
sauce: look on chain
Whales’ short bets may prompt more large investors to follow suit and bet on falling prices in major cryptocurrencies.
Back in August, nine whale addresses acquired a total of $456 million worth of Ether after a whale with $11 billion in Bitcoin rotated $5 billion of Bitcoin into ETH.
According to Willy Wu, an analyst and early adopter of Bitcoin, the massive sell-off by previously dormant Bitcoin whales was one of the main factors limiting Bitcoin’s price movement in August.
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Bitcoin correction is caused by small cohorts, not whales
After hitting a new all-time high of over $125,700 on Sunday, Bitcoin has fallen to over $121,350 at the time of writing, according to data from Cointelegraph.
According to a Thursday
sauce: cryptoquant
Shrimp Cohort refers to the addresses of individual investors with less than 1 Bitcoin. Crab addresses hold up to 10 Bitcoins, while Fish addresses hold between 50 and 100 BTC.
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Most crypto traders also expect a short-term decline in the crypto market.
Long and short trading on the exchange. Source: CoinAnk.com
According to blockchain data from CoinAnk, more than 52% of Bitcoin holders across all exchanges are currently short, or betting that the price of Bitcoin will fall, while 47% remain long.
About 51% of Ether traders are also shorting the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency in anticipation of a decline.
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