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After moving markets with its shuffling of Bitcoin holdings, Grayscale has significantly slowed its BTC outflows down, according to blockchain analysts.
In a Tuesday post on Twitter, Arkham Intelligence dropped figures showing that Grayscale had offloaded over 4,400 BTC to its custodian Coinbase over the past day.
The price of that much BTC right now stands under $200 million. But that latest offloading was “less than half of the average daily volume last week.”
Flows from Grayscale today were only 4.4K BTC, or $192.6M.
That’s less than half of the average daily volume last week.
Is Barry done selling?https://t.co/K7P3NmGZFH pic.twitter.com/vgQT3oLue3
— Arkham (@ArkhamIntel) January 30, 2024
Earlier this month, the fund manager—a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group (DCG)—was getting rid of much more in digital coins, at one point moving $2.2 billion in a matter of days to the American exchange.
This appeared to subject the price of the cryptocurrency to take a beating.
Now, industry observers like Arkham are concluding that the institution may be close to done. Arkham asked on Tuesday: “Is Barry done selling?”—referring to DCG CEO Barry Silbert.
Grayscale started shifting its BTC to Coinbase for selling because onit converted its fund into a BTC exchange-traded fund (ETF) on January 10. Prior to Grayscale’s Bitcoin Fund ETF conversion, it operated like a closed-end fund, and investors had to hold their shares for at least six months.
Since it was transformed into a popular new investment vehicle, investors have been keen to redeem their holdings.
Analysts were torn on whether the price of BTC would explode following the long-awaited approval of BTC ETFs. At first, it did—rising briefly to flirt with $49,000 per coin for the first time since 2021.
It then dropped with the Grayscale movements.
With BTC’s price now at $43,535—an 11% weekly rise—could it be on an upward trajectory?
