Bitcoin Rally Fueled By USD Coin (USDC) Rotating Into BTC: Santiment

Keshav Verma

Last Updated: June 11, 2024 7:09 am

3 mins read

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On-chain data from Santiment suggests the latest Bitcoin rally may have been fueled by USD Coin (USDC) shifting into the cryptocurrency.

USD Coin Shark And Whale Addresses Have Declined Recently

According to data from the on-chain analytics firm Santiment, USDC whale and shark addresses have gone down by almost 8% in the last two months. The relevant indicator here is the “Supply Distribution,” which tells us the total number of addresses that belong to each wallet group in the market right now.

The wallet groups here are divided based on the number of USDC tokens that they are holding currently. For example, an address that’s holding five coins will be included in the 1-10 coins group.

If the Supply Distribution metric is applied to this particular group, it will measure, among other things, the total number of addresses on the network whose balances fall inside this coin range.

Now, in the context of the current discussion, the wallet groups of interest are the ones covering the 100,000-100 million coins range.

Here is a chart that shows the trend in the Supply Distribution data for the three address cohorts that make up this range over the last few months:

Looks like all three of these groups have registered a decline in recent weeks | Source: Santiment on Twitter

The significance of this coin range is that it includes two important USDC cohorts called the sharks and whales. As shown in the graph, the wallet groups that cover these investors had seen a rapid increase in their total addresses when the FTX collapse took place back in the November of 2022.

The reason behind this rise was that investors cashed out of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin into the stablecoin as the crash occurred. In the last couple of months, however, the metric looks to have been going down instead.

In total, these three wallet groups have lost around 2,001 addresses, which represents a decrease of about 7.8%. This suggests that these sharks and whales have been leaving the stablecoin in this period, possibly for other cryptocurrencies like BTC.

Generally, investors use stables when they want to avoid the volatility that usually comes with the other assets in the sector. However, once they feel that the time is right to jump back into these volatile markets, they rotate back into their desired coins, thus applying buying pressure to them.

This buying pressure can naturally show up as a surge in the price of the cryptocurrencies that they have been shifting into. From the chart, it’s visible that since the USDC shark and whale addresses have started to trend down, Bitcoin has caught an upwards momentum.

A potential interpretation of this trend can be that the latest BTC rally has been, at least in part, fueled by the buying pressure applied by these USDC sharks and whales.

Bitcoin Price

At the time of writing, Bitcoin is trading around $24,000, up 6% in the last week.

BTC has registered some drawdown today | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView

Featured image from Jonathan Borba on Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Santiment.net

Keshav Verma

Keshav is currently a senior writer at NewsBTC and has been attached to the website since June 14, 2021.

Keshav has been writing for many years, first as a hobbyist and later as a freelancer. He has experience working in a variety of niches, even fiction at one point, but the cryptocurrency industry has been the longest he has been attached to.

In terms of official educational qualifications, Keshav holds a bachelor’s degree in Physics from one of the premier institutes of India, the University of Delhi (DU). He started the degree with an aim of eventually making a career in Physics, but the onset of COVID led to a shift in plans. The virus meant that the college classes had to be delivered in the online-mode and with it came free time for him to explore other passions.

Initially only seeking to make some beer money, Keshav unexpectedly landed clients offering real projects, after which there was no looking back. Writing was something he had always enjoyed and to be able to do it for a living was like a dream come true.

Keshav completed his Physics degree in 2022 and has been focusing on his writing career since, but that doesn’t mean his passion for Physics has ended. He eventually plans to re-enter university to obtain a masters degree in the same field, but perhaps only to satiate his own interest rather than for using it as a means to find employment..

Keshav has found blockchain and its concepts fascinating ever since he started going down the rabbit-hole back in 2020. On-chain analysis in particular has been something he likes to research more about, which is why his NewsBTC pieces tend to involve it in some form.

Being of the science background, Keshav likes if concepts are clear and consistent, so he generally explains the indicators he talks about in a bit of detail so that the readers can perhaps come out having understood and learnt something new.

As for hobbies, Keshav is super into football, anime, and videogames. He enjoys football not only as a watcher, but also as a player. For games, Keshav generally tends towards enjoying singleplayer adventures, with EA FC (formerly FIFA) being the only online game he is active in. Though, perhaps due to being ultra-focused on the game, he is today a semi-pro on the EA FC scene, regularly participating in tournaments and sometimes even taking back prize money.

Because of his enthusiasm for anime and games, he also self-learned Japanese along the way to consume some of the untranslated gems out there. The skill didn’t merely remain as just a hobby, either, as he put it to productive use during his exploration for small-time gigs at the start of COVID, fulfilling a couple of Japanese-to-English translation jobs.

Keshav is also big into fitness, with agility and acceleration-related workouts making a big part of his program due to the relevance they have in football. On top of that, he also has a more traditional strength based program for the gym, which he does to maintain an overall fitness level of his body.

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