Bittrex Serviced the Whale That Caused BTC’s Temporary $1,000 Surge


Recently, Live Bitcoin News reported that many members of the crypto community were suspicious of a $1,000 surge incurred by bitcoin, the world’s leading cryptocurrency by market cap. It has now been stated that the surge was no doubt the result of a bitcoin whale moving money between accounts with Bittrex, one of the world’s top cryptocurrency exchanges.

Bittrex at the Head of Whale Activity

Bitcoin and cryptocurrency whales can have serious effects on the industry. A whale is someone who houses huge sums of digital money – i.e. millions, or sometimes even billions as in this case – in a single account. The money, for the most part, stays where it is, as rich people typically like to let their wealth sit for a while and grow.

However, every now and then, there is need to move these funds from one wallet to another. Whenever this happens, the maneuver is likely to cause several ripples throughout the industry as usually, the money being moved is a vast amount. This doesn’t always fly well in the industry and can cause bitcoin’s price to exhibit very strange behavior. Most of the time, bitcoin’s price is likely to fall heavily, though in the recently reported case, it turns out that bitcoin incurred a heavy (albeit temporary) surge.

The transaction in question this time around involved as much as 1.3 million bitcoins. That means that roughly $9 billion in digital funds were moved from one wallet to another in short of an hour, suggesting it’s the highest transaction to ever occur in the history of bitcoin. While the whale’s identity remains unknown at the time of writing, Glass Node has revealed that Bittrex was the exchange responsible for the trade.

Glass Node wrote in a tweet:

This $8.9 billion spike in on-chain volume was caused by @Bittrex Exchange, moving a large amount of #bitcoin several times – a series of 21 transactions within one hour, each moving around 56,000 $BTC.

It appears the transaction occurred before Bittrex was set to undergo scheduled maintenance. The exchange announced in a statement that it would be offline on December 5 from 11 AM PST to 12 PM PST. The transaction occurred just a few hours before this hour-long window.

At press time, no reason for the transaction has been given. However, some are being praised for their ability to foresee evidence before it was announced and understand the situation. Among those being hailed is Mati Greenspan, a senior analyst at e-Toro, who predicted that the $1,000 rise in price could only be the result of whale activity.

Predicting Things as They Come

Earlier this week, the analyst wrote:

The sudden movement on an otherwise uneventful day… it all points to the assumption that this was the outcome of a single player with a large buy order… a large whale.

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