Bitcoin uptrend not over: Big whales aren't selling BTC, data shows

The price of Bitcoin (BTC) is consolidating between the $55,000 to $59,000 range, establishing the mid-$50,000 region as a support area. This trend coincides with strengthening on-chain fundamentals, such as whale and address activity.

Since the Bitcoin rally began to accelerate in November 2020, the seven-day average active address has increased in tandem. A pseudonymous trader known as "Crypto Birb" pointed out:

"$BTC seven day average over daily active addresses in sideways while price action climbs. The upside trend is the strongest when backed by onchain trends."

It shows that on-chain trends have been supplementing both short and long-term Bitcoin price cycles.

Big whales are not selling but accumulating Bitcoin

According to the data from Santiment, big Bitcoin whales have been mostly accumulating Bitcoin as over 35,000 BTC has left exchanges in the past 30 days. The latest outflows have also pushed down exchanges' BTC reserves to the lowest levels since early March before BTC hit new all-time highs above $60,000. 

The Santiment team wrote:

"As you'd expect, not all of #Bitcoin's whales are behaving in unison. However, we've seen interesting trends these past couple months, such as 100-1,000 $BTC addresses adding 353k more $BTC since Feb. 1st, while 1k-10k addresses have shed 300k $BTC."

The chart shows that 1,000 BTC to 10,000 BTC addresses have been selling, but analysts from Whalemap said that this range is a difficult range to analyze.

This range could include exchange addresses, which are not tagged by most on-chain data gathering platforms, so ideally, it would be more accurate to compare 100 BTC to 1,000 BTC, and then 10,000+ BTC holding addresses.

Whalemap analysts told Cointelegraph:

"In the 1k-10k band there are a lot of exchanges So this could be a part of it, as they are reducing the availability. Since these addresses could be exchanges, a better representation would be looking at 10k+ BTC and 100-1000 BTC."

Additionally, researchers at Glassnode found that during bull markets, old coins move more frequently.

As long-time holders move to sell, it puts significant selling pressure on Bitcoin. However, in the current phase of the cycle, the frequency of old BTC moving is much lower than 50%, or where BTC topped out in previous cycles.

Glassnode researchers explained:

"In bull markets old coins tend to move more. This increases the relative supply of younger coins in the network. At previous $BTC tops, around 50% of the #Bitcoin supply was younger than 6 months. We are currently significantly below this level (36%)."

Bull trend intact as long as $55,000 support is defended

Considering that big whales have been accumulating Bitcoin as the cryptocurrency consolidates between $55,000 and $59,000, the bull trend remains intact despite the rising U.S. 10-year Treasury yields.

As Cointelegraph reported, when the 10-year Treasury yield begins rising, the risk-on markets typically take a hit, particularly in the near term.

In the past two weeks, as an example, U.S. tech stocks saw a steep pullback, which coincided with Bitcoin stagnating under $60,000.

However, given that on-chain data remains optimistic for Bitcoin, as long as the $55,000 support area remains defended, the bullish market structure would raise the probability of a larger rally.