Grayscale Prepares to Sell Another 9,000 BTC
Grayscale moved 9,000 BTC in preparation for another sale as total outflows from GBTC get close to $600 million. Bitcoin price continues to struggle.
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Digital asset manager Grayscale transferred 9,000 BTC worth $385 million to an exchange address early on Tuesday. The move shows that the firm is selling more Bitcoin holdings as investors withdraw from the GBTC exchange-traded fund. The incident caused a sharp drop in BTC value, although the flagship asset quickly recovered to steady above $43,000.
According to Arkham Intelligence, Grayscale moved the BTC to Coinbase Prime address in batches of 1000 BTC each. The firm has already sold 2000 BTC last week. It is now set to sell more in the coming weeks. Despite this, Grayscale still holds 617.85k BTC. However, Grayscale Bitcoin Trust holdings have dropped below 610,000 BTC.
The asset manager has moved 11,000 BTC from its Bitcoin holdings for GBTC since the Securities and Exchange Commission approved the conversion of GBTC to an ETF. This is due to the outflows from GBTC as investors keep selling their shares. According to Bloomberg data, GBTC outflows currently stand at $579 million. Investors are mostly pulling out of GBTC because of its high fees relative to other ETFs.
Bitcoin Price Struggles
Tuesday’s transfers caused a sudden drop in Bitcoin value, with the flagship asset dropping as low as $42,086 on CoinMarketCap before it recovered. BTC has now steadied above $43,000. However, the asset continues to struggle with an almost 5% drop over the last seven days.
Bitcoin troubles started in the wake of the ETF approval. The predictions by analysts that the ETF approval would be a "sell the news" event have proven to be correct, with the asset under selling pressure since January 11. According to Paris-based Kaiko, the selling pressure is concentrated on Binance, OKX, and UpBit.
Kaiko analyzed Bitcoin slump post ETF approval using the cumulative volume data (CVD) metric. It noted that CVD was strong across all exchanges in the hours after ETFs started trading. On Binance alone, about 3k BTC was bought in the hour after the market opened in the US.
However, Binance CVD has fallen, as has OKX, Itbit, and UpBit since then. All these exchanges have shown consistent selling, with Binance CVD showing that about 5,000 have been sold on the exchange.
What Next For Bitcoin
Despite the price swings, Bitcoin has stayed in the $42k to $43k range for most of the last seven days. But the asset could still see more pullbacks before it can finally rebound. This is highly likely if GBTC outflow continues, forcing the asset manager to offload more Bitcoin.
Inflow into the other Bitcoin ETFs has generally been below expectations. Contrary to the predicted $4 billion inflow on the first day, all nine Bitcoin ETFs have only pulled in $1.4 billion in net flow by day two. This is below market expectations and could affect BTC price.
