For the past few weeks, the consensus is that a lot of institutional investors are buying Bitcoin and are behind the digital asset’s 2020 price rally. If the words of Philip Gradwell, an economist at Chainalysis are anything to go by, then this consensus is not just hearsay. On-chain data suggests that this popular narrative is true.
According to the economist, the number of wallets holding at least 1.000 bitcoin has increased by 17% (302) in 2020, leading to a new record high of 2,052 wallets. Chainlysis in its weekly market intel newsletter dated December 10, said:
“That’s a big increase in the wealthiest wallets and provides evidence that institutional investors have entered the market."
Another data from Glassnode claims that the number of individual addresses holding at least 1,000 bitcoin is up by over 7% to 2,270.
At its current price of around $18,000, one thousand bitcoins is equivalent to $18 million.
Several notable publicly listed companies including Square and MicroStrategy are diversifying their portfolio to include bitcoin. This is boosting the digital asset’s appeal as a possible reserve asset. Smaller investors are not left out of the mix. Gradwell notes that the number of wallets holding five or more bitcoin has accumulated over 2.4 million coins, while the number of wallets holding at least five bitcoins has increased by 4% to sit at 234,408.
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