78% Bitcoins Circulating Supply Illiquid As Investors Refuse To Sell Amid FTX Contagion

Nearly 78% of Bitcoin’s BTC/USD total circulating supply is illiquid, as investors have been pulling their digital assets away from exchanges and storing them in custodial wallets, to avoid selling them.

What Happened: According to Glassnode on-chain data analyzed by Cryptoslate, only 22% of all mined Bitcoin is moving around and being exchanged. Bitcoin has been trading downward for nearly the entirety of 2022, triggered by the crypto winter and collapse of FTX FTT/USD crypto exchange.

“Think of illiquidity as the point when Bitcoin moves to a wallet that shows no spending history, while liquidity is when BTC moves to wallets that have a history of spending such as hot wallets and exchanges,” Cryptoslate researchers said.

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Glassnode data shows that less Bitcoin is available for trading, which implies that there is a high level of accumulation and holding. Furthermore, the decrease in liquid supply is an indication that major sell-offs and capitulations are subsiding.

Of the 15 million Bitcoins that are not available for purchase, 4.3 million are in constant circulation. A large proportion of these coins are held either by short-term investors or traders. Thus, positioning Bitcoin's supply shock at the same level as when it was valued at $53,000, indicates that short-term holders have lost to long-term holders.

Price Action: At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $16,960, down 0.81%, in the past 24 hours.
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