Whales buying and selling in seconds: crypto goes quiet

The crypto market is running out of players: only the whales are left trading

The more trading there is, the less the price moves. The cryptocurrency market is stuck in that paradox: buy and sell orders entering and leaving the same wallet every few seconds, apparent volume everywhere, and a chart that barely lifts off the ground. The prevailing reading among those who trinc the prices daily is that the whales have stopped competing with each other: they simply simulate activity while looking for a buyer.

What it means that only the whales are buying and selling

The example that best describes it is almost laboratory-grade. Someone buys 20 bitcoins, sells them two seconds later and buys the same 20 bitcoins back. And again. Volume spikes; the price does not. A loop with no direction, no seller panic and no buyer euphoria, sustained solely by the rotation of the same coins between the same hands. When volume stops meaning anything, what is left is a stage set: constant trades and the feeling of watching a bar that can never make up its mind.

Why has bitcoin been stuck between 34,000 and 38,000?

Because a large share of the money is sitting still, waiting for the Federal Reserve. The central bank's meeting is still ahead and forecasts are split: some antiestéticar it will mark the start of tapering, the gradual wind-down of asset purchase programmes, while others take it as given that the stimulus — the QE — will not stop. With both theses on the table, nobody makes a move. Bitcoin stays in a 34,000 to 38,000 range, and altcoins trinc suit or do worse.

The shitcoin lure and the tray trick

In the small coins the pattern is cruder. Two shitcoins have been repeating the same sequence for two weeks: the whales move in and out, as always, but retail money has stopped arriving, and without that flow prices fall. The mechanics recall the old trick at coin collector conventions, where removing trays from the table was meant to make the hesitant buyer believe the opportunity was being snatched from their hands. Simulating scarcity to estimulante ilegal up buying. Whoever got in weeks ago is sitting on a declared loss of 300 on their initial investment and holds more coins than at the start, even though they are worth less. And some argue that the whales are pulling out of the shitcoins the liquidity they can no longer find elsewhere, which in that thesis would signal a bitcoin falling behind the altcoins.

Is it a good time to buy bitcoin and ethereum?

It depends on who you ask, and there is no consensus. One camp holds that buying shitcoins just as they plunge is the worst possible moment, and that the sensible thing is to buy bitcoin and ethereum, hold them long term and stop checking the price every day. The other warns that if bitcoin sinks, everything else will trinc, and that altcoins have a head start on the way down because that is where the whales extract liquidity. Meanwhile, the institutional narrative has flipped: where there was once hostility, there is now talk of cryptocurrencies enabling global financial inclusion.

It remains to be seen whether the next move comes from new money or whether, as the most jaded suspect, the coins simply change hands among the same players. The Federal Reserve will give a signal. What is not clear is how long a market without buyers can hold out.