Bitcoin whales sent over 21k BTC to exchanges in 48 hours

Bitcoin (BTC) whale activity has recently seen an uptick, with deep-pocketed addresses sending up to 21,851 ($545 million) to exchanges in the past 48 hours. The development comes on the back of the recent market-wide rally that saw BTC reclaim the $26,000 price.

Whale-tracking resource Whale Alert drew public attention to the recent surge in whale activity, highlighting seven transactions involved in the massive exchange inflow. The latest transactions saw an unknown address transfer 1,000 BTC ($24.8 million) to Gate.io today at 2:39 AM (UTC).

This transaction was preceded by another massive whale transfer involving the movement of 1,500 BTC ($37 million) to Binance yesterday at 10:18 PM (UTC). 

Moreover, behavior analytics platform Santiment highlighted this dominance of whale transactions in a report yesterday. According to the platform, BTC transactions involving at least $1 million worth of the asset have increased to their highest point since November 2022.

Amid this slew of whale transactions, the CryptoQuant Exchange Reserve has seen a massive increase in recent times, surging to a current value of 2.17 million tokens. The last time this amount of BTC tokens was found on exchanges was mid-January. Moreover, BTC exchange net flow recently hit its highest value in 10 months, as disclosed in a previous report.

Bitcoin’s break above $26,000

This behavior suggests increased selling pressure as investors leverage the recently-engineered market-wide rally to rake in profits on their bitcoin investments. The asset recently hit a 9-month high of $26,386 before facing a mild correction. 

The latest rally came on the heels of the recent U.S. inflation report, which revealed that the inflation rate cooled to 6% in February, as opposed to the 6.4% rate observed in January. Notably, this marks the eighth consecutive time the inflation rate is witnessing a decrease since the peak of 9.1% in June 2022.

This signals that the Federal Reserve’s tussle with inflation is shifting to propitious territories and would influence a dial-down of its aggressive interest rate hikes. Though BTC faced opposition above the $26,000 zone, the asset still maintained a 12% gain in the past week, trading for $24,471.