After the bitcoin block reward halving is completed, already $ 220 million worth of bitcoin “leaves” the exchange. Is the user not trusting the cryptocurrency exchange? Or just consider the exchange as a store of value?
According to the Bitcoin Exchange Net-Flow data provided by the on-chain market analysis platform Glassnode, since the halving of the Bitcoin block reward on May 11, nearly 24,000 bitcoins have been exchanged Withdraw. In fact, the trend of Bitcoin outflows from cryptocurrency exchanges began in mid-April of this year. “Interestingly”, Glassnode data shows that within a few hours before and after “halving” Bitcoin. The bitcoin trend flowing out of the exchange has been temporarily delayed, they disclosed on Twitter:
“In the hours before and after the halving of Bitcoin block rewards, the exchange’s net traffic has dropped significantly. But so far, the incident has had no effect on the trend of investors withdrawing Bitcoin from the exchange in 2020.”
Investors no longer put Bitcoin on the exchange, which indicates that there will be two new trends:
1. Current users want to take more responsibility for their funds, in contrast, they may not trust the exchange so much;
2. A large number of new users may have begun to view Bitcoin as a store of value, rather than a trading asset.
It is worth noting that after the third “halving” in the history of Bitcoin, many industry observers are paying attention to the health of the Bitcoin network. However, since bitcoin prices have not fluctuated too much and only “lost” a little bit of computing power, the reaction of those skeptics may not be so intense. Another thing that should be noted is that the market value of USDT briefly surpassed Ripple on May 12, and the total market value of stablecoins also exceeded US $ 10 billion. According to USDT market data, the market value of the stablecoin Tether has reached 5.74 billion US dollars, accounting for more than half of the total market value of the stablecoin.
The above picture is the cryptocurrency exchange reserve data on April 12, 2020. The left picture is from Bituniverse, and the right picture is from Chain.info. The data of Chain.info and Bituniverse are slightly different.
If we analyze the data, most of the bitcoin transfers come from specific exchanges, not the head exchanges. For example, Coinbase still has the most bitcoin reserves, and the reserves have basically not changed much. However, since April 12, the number of bitcoins transferred by Huobi Exchange has been around 20,000. Since then, Bitfinex and BitMEX exchanges have also seen a considerable amount of bitcoin being withdrawn. The number of bitcoin reserves in mid-April was about 205,000, but now there are only 134,000; BitMEX had about 228,000 bitcoins in mid-April, and it had been reduced to 214,000 on March 13, 2020.
Of course, not all the number of bitcoins in cryptocurrency exchanges is decreasing. According to the data of Bituniverse, the number of bitcoins on cryptocurrency exchange Bitstamp on April 12, 2020 was about 66,000, which has now grown to 7.1 Ten thousand.
The picture above is the bitcoin reserve data disclosed by Bituniverse on May 13, 2020.
Since mid-April, more than one million “traders” may have left the cryptocurrency exchange, far exceeding the number of people who withdrew from the exchange in the “Proof-of-Keys” campaign initiated by Trace Mayer. (Chain must be noted: On January 3, 2019, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Bitcoin genesis block, Reddit user “sotashi” encouraged Bitcoin holders to withdraw all Bitcoin from the exchange. Subsequently, Bitcoin Knowledge podcast host Trace Mayer tweeted in support of the idea and proposed that January 3 of each year be designated as “Proof of Keys” day as a bitcoin cultural tradition.)
But in fact, this “evacuation” does not seem to have much impact on the Bitcoin market. Just like the Bitcoin mining industry, exchanges are also undergoing huge power transfers, and some large-scale cryptocurrency exchanges will also be affected. The rising star replaces-of course, this may take some time. After all, Coinbase has maintained its number one position for a long time, and also has a strong reserve of 1 million bitcoins.
It is worth mentioning that the number of bitcoins held by the top 10 cryptocurrency exchanges accounts for 13% of the total circulation. In addition, the number of bitcoins stored in the on-chain wallet also exceeds 2,300 BTC (about 21.7 million US dollars) . Although Coinbase is at the top of the list, the amount of Bitcoin it controls accounts for nearly 5.2% of Bitcoin’s total circulation, but many people have begun to be vigilant because this order of magnitude is sufficient to manipulate the market price of Bitcoin.
Is the funds on the exchange safe?
Crypto communities often question the security of exchanges, and sometimes also the IQ of giant whales who hold large amounts of cryptocurrency. For example, the well-known Twitter user @Bitcoin once posted such a tweet:
“Not your key, not your coin.”
Encrypted data analysis company Chainalysis disclosed in its 2020 Encryption Crime Report that encryption hackers are becoming more sophisticated, and the number of hackers attacking cryptocurrency exchanges is also increasing. The funds obtained by the exchange exceeded US $ 1.1 billion. In addition, there were 11 cryptocurrency attacks in 2019 alone, a record high (as shown in the figure below, data source Chainalysis).
The number of Bitcoin HODLer is more than ever
Recently, the number of daily active addresses in Bitcoin exceeded one million for the third time. Prior to this, this indicator data only reached the “million” level during the Bitcoin bull market in mid-June 2019 and late 2017. (As shown below, the data source: studio.glassnode.com)
In addition, the number of new Bitcoin addresses is also increasing steadily, and the average number of new addresses per week has recently reached its highest level in two years. Overall, many current Bitcoin market indicators have shown good development potential.