Crypto Whales at Work: What’s Driving the Market in 2023?
The year has just begun, but crypto whales have already managed to have an impact on the market. What happened to the most prominent tokens in the first two weeks of the new year?
Let’s discuss the “big fish” movements in the cryptocurrency market.
Are the Predictions Coming True?
At the end of 2022, Coinbase published forecasts for the coming year, which described the prospects of the crypto market.
According to David Duong, CFA Head of Institutional Research, in the new year investors will prefer choosing digital assets in favor of higher quality tokens like BTC and ETH, there will be a rapid development of the ETH network after its successful merger, and interest in DeFi and tokenization will increase.
In the first two weeks of 2023, we can already see positive growth trends in cryptocurrencies, from Bitcoin to meme coins, with crypto whales influencing these trends.
Bitcoin: The Unchanging Power
Despite the Bitcoin (BTC) price chart over the past few weeks, the crypto whales have been moving these assets quite actively. Crypto Quant reports four large transactions in just the first week of January.
The largest of these, worth 15,480 BTC, occurred on January 5. In three other transactions around the same date, transactions of 3,001 BTC, 4,614 BTC, and 5,208 BTC were made.
These assets had probably remained untouched in wallets for three to five years.
The Success of Altcoins
CoinGape Media reports that the price of the Ripple native token XRP rose nearly 10% in the first week of 2023. By January 12, the daily number of active XRP addresses was 148,500.
WhaleAlert reported that crypto whales moved about 193 million XRP (approximately $70 million) in numerous transactions between Jan 11 and Jan 12.
The largest transaction was the purchase of more than 44.2 million XRP (approximately $15.5 million) by a whale on the Bitso exchange.
Large asset transfers also took place on the Polygon network. 90.5 million MATIC worth $72 million were transferred from unknown wallets to the network. It is notable that from late December to mid-January the price of MATIC, according to CoinMarketCap, began to rise from $0.7 to $0.9 per token.
Whale activity on the Ethereum network also surged, exceeding 410 transactions worth more than $1 million earlier this week.
According to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of Ethereum, the interest in the ecosystem is driven by five main factors: money, DeFi, identity systems, DAOs, and hybrid applications. Buterin himself stressed that the network’s particular success was achieved in the development of stablecoins and scaling technology.
Cardano blockchain was not spared from the positive dynamics. Crypto traders have been interested in buying ADA, and since the beginning of 2023, there have been 28 new whale addresses owning more than 1 million ADA, with the number of transactions growing.
Note that Finbold reported on January 9th that $1.5 billion had flowed into Cardano in just 24 hours, as the decentralized financial asset (DeFi) continues to experience increased buying pressure.
Even the SHIB meme token, which is called “DOGE killer” in the network, was not left without the attention of the crypto whales. Bitcoinist noticed a significant SHIB transaction worth $28.7 million.
Binance’s bad luck at the start of 2023
In the new year, Binance is gradually losing investors’ confidence. The conflict associated with the collapse of FTX in November 2022 and the CZ’s position on it affected the state of Binance in the new year. Thus, DefiLlama reported the withdrawal of funds from the exchange on January 6 in the amount of 360 million dollars.
Investors’ distrust is also evident in the example of BNB and BUSD. Over the past two months, BNB has lost 29% of its value, and the total volume of BUSD on the exchange has decreased by 40%.
Final Thoughts
The end of 2022 was not an easy year for the cryptocurrency world. However, just two weeks of the new year showed that crypto whales are not afraid of winter and continue to trade both popular tokens and less significant ones in the market.
Overall, crypto whales have shown great interest in the most prominent tokens in early 2023. This gives grounds to make some assumptions about the future development of the market. I think the price of BTC will not fluctuate much in the next quarter of this year.
ETH will show itself from a more powerful side — that’s what Coinbase analysts think and that’s how it seems to me. Maybe, Binance will need some more time to recover after the crisis, but the popularity of this exchange creates all the conditions for the renewal of investors’ trust.
I also assume that large investors and ordinary users will pay special attention to DeFi, especially DEX tokens. This is indicated by analysts’ opinions and the market situation itself.
