24 hours ago, users began reporting about the “biggest sell wall I’ve ever seen“: a 31 000 bitcoin sell wall appeared mysteriously at 300 USD per bitcoin onBitstamp. I must agree, this is the biggest sell wall I’ve ever seen. One thing that amazes me is how little the market has moved in those 24 hours since the Sell Wall of Death.
Not only has the market refrained from panic selling below 300 USD per btc (where 275 USD became the lowest point), people are even chomping the Bitcoin sell wall. If you watch the order book and the live trades you can see the Sell Wall of Death is being eaten alive, little by little. Most buys are from one to ten bitcoins, while every 10 to 30 minutes someone chomps up more than 200 to 300 bitcoins.
Just in 14 hours the sell wall has shrunk by more than 50%.
Update: the sell wall is now below 14 000 bitcoins just 30 minutes after I started on this post.
Who’s Behind the Bitcoin Sell Wall?
Well, that’s the question we all wonder about. I have a few theories, but since only the whale himself really knows who he/she/they are (and Bitstamp), I will only write up the obvious guesses.
- The Bitcoin Whale is most likely the same person that caused the Bitcoin price to fall from 500 to 300 the last month, explaining the Bitcoin price decrease.
- The Bitcoin Whale has, or had, a lot of bitcoins. This could point to a few people:
- An early adopter
- A group of people
- A company
- A group of companies (FYI: Bitstamp allegedly only allows private trading on their Bitcoin Exchange)
Why Bring the Bitcoin Price Down?
People are also discussing why someone would want to bring the Bitcoin price down (or get rid of their bitcoins). For someone to actively seek out to crash the Bitcoin market, they would need to gain from a crash. This could be traders shorting Bitcoin, other companies or banks that see Bitcoin as a threat, or similar. When Russia plans to fine its Bitcoin users, there may be a couple of Russians that want to unload their Bitcoin holdings. However, this does not explain why the sell wall is located onBitstamp.
What do you think are the motives of the Bitcoin Whale?
