Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

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I am but a simple primate with a brain not too dissimilar in structure to a pebble you might use to skip into the ruddy waters of a small creek you grew up next to.

What follows is highly likely to be nothing more than evidence of my early onset dementia and it is certainly not any kind of advice, but I felt compelled to share it in the event it is a useful puzzle piece to anyone whose has been wondering about a possible relationship between hedge funds and crypto holdings, the sort that have been circling the rumor mill lately.

I stumbled upon u/itsblockchain‘s post about a particular BTC address and, on a whim, decided to have a little look-see. A few hours later, here’s what I know:

The collosal whale in question has mostly been in BTC accumulation mode only since early-2019 with its tidy initial investment of some $4 million. It has the unique distinction of selling their crypto (now valued at $4 billion!) at points that appear to coincide with the price action of large GME movements over the last 4 months. I’ve been trying to map everything to lineup with options expiries, buys, etc., but it’s absolutely too much for my velvety-smooth frontal lobes. More on that in the conclusion.

Before I share these screen grabs, it’s worth noting that what makes this address so special is that these are the only times they sell from January onward this year. Another interesting point is that virtually all of their sell-off events are in multiples of 1500BTC lots. (This last point may just make for easy accounting since the underlying value has changed so much, but feels worth pointing out).

Okay, onto the data:

  • On January 11th, GME begins its ascent from $19.94 to a high of $347.51 on January 27th. Our whale sells three lots of 1500BTC, totaling $144,194,982.18.
r/Superstonk - Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

Jan 11 sell-offs.

  • On January 28th, GME drops to $193.60. Our whale sells two lots of 1500BTC, totaling $97,863,593.77.
r/Superstonk - Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

Jan 28th sell-offs.

  • On January 29th, GME rockets back to $325. At the same time, our illustrious whale appears to have taken a liking to krill-flavored, gold-plated, gourmet FunyunsR and promptly liquidates a whopping $336,754,682.47 of BTC in 3 lots.
r/Superstonk - Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

Jan 29th sell-offs. Probably a coincidence.

  • By February 4th, GME has come down to $53.50, then rises to $63.77 and falls again to $60 over a 4-day period that resembles what professional investors call a “nipple”. The whale liquidates $121,945,686.75 over the same period.
r/Superstonk - Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

Early February sell-offs.

What follows are 3 more sales of BTC, all in the same 1500BTC lots:

  • April 11th and 13th – 3000 BTC worth $183,717,827.45.
r/Superstonk - Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

Yawn.

  • May 4th and 6th – 3000 BTC worth $167,099,254.90.
r/Superstonk - Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

Nothing to see here.

  • May 8th – 3000 BTC worth $175,510,763.61.
r/Superstonk - Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

Surely not related to liquidity issues.

Here’s a helpful chart provided by u/teacoat___ that overlays the dates above (blue lines) on the movement of GME.

r/Superstonk - Bitcoin address activity appear to mirror GME price movements

Thanks, u/teacoat___!

To be completely fair, it’s worth pointing out that correlation does not equal causation. We don’t know who this account belongs to other than that they are:

  • an entity that has been fortunate enough to funnel hundreds of millions, nay billions in crypto in 2 years,
  • that they pretty much only accumulate, but
  • when they do spend, it’s for who knows what that just so happens to coordinate with massive price movements in a totally random stock.
  • Also, their selloffs correlate inversely to in-progress or the beginnings of BTC price rallies which would be the worst time to sell off unless you absolutely needed to.
    • Jan 27th – BTC begins rising from its low of $30,432.55 to $57,539.95 on Feb. 21st.
    • April 11th – BTC is in the middle of another of its attempts to reach its zenith that comes at $63,503.46 on April 13th.
    • May 4th – BTC goes from $53,333.54 to $58,803.78 on May 8th.
  • Also, that their timing is impeccable. In the last two cases, they are able to time the high for the period after which are massive declines in BTC price, the latter of which has not yet been recovered from. This seems to indicate cutting edge Market Whisperer-like abilities of the sorts that are available to those at investment banks.

To wrap this up, I want to reiterate that I wrote this because both our sub and crypto’s are beginning to speculate on the relationship between the two. What we can and can’t say is important and worth pointing out.

At this point, what I think we need, barring access to some government-grade analysis tools like Elliptic.co, is a way to analyze the blockchain a bit better. It would be helpful if we could, for example, compare similar addresses that only have spending dates that correlate with price movement of a particular publicly available stock as this one does in our simple illustration. This would bypass address and routing obfuscation often used by exchanges and stablecoins and allow us to make some best guesses without having to actually care about specifically naming names at this point.

It’s also worth trying to figure out what the other handful of pre-2021 sell-offs were a part of, if such a thing can be intimated at. Ditto for the April/May sell-offs and if there is any relationship to margin calls or known liquidity issues on the part of the hedgies.

CAN ANYONE LEND A HAND?

It bears repeating: I am an exquisitely smooth-brained ape.

Feedback and comments welcome as this is my first quasi-aspirational DD. #buy and #hodl

Edit 1: grammar and an additional question in the follow-up section.

Edit 2: Another interesting fact that u/Chocowark helped me realize is that this entity also employs address reuse. In the crypto space, this is a big no-no because it reduces privacy by letting any old ape scrutinize your transaction history just as we’re doing here. Trade analysts could theoretically also monitor your activity and front-run against you. Second, it implies that they’re using an older wallet that doesn’t support address regeneration. Most new wallets do this for you automatically, so the fact that this account doesn’t use it would seem to indicate that they either a) don’t have a new wallet (and are behind the security best practices curve), or b) that they actively disabled regeneration and they want a record in order to meet an obligation of auditing.

Edit 3: Some commenters in the original post are scrutinizing this from a Bitcoin market-only perspective and seem to be under the impression that this address is just dumping blocks of Bitcoin to create liquidity out of the poor saps who see the drop and sell which lets the whale buy back in. It looks convincing except for the fact that they’re NOT BUYING BACK IN when they should be if they wanted to make an immediate profit in Bitcoin as they could have. I tried pointing this out in my bullet points 4 and 5 above. Again, it could be a random fluke that this address just so happens to go active when GME had its biggest trading spikes, but neither Bitcoin nor GME seem to have moved in this entity’s favor from the perspective of someone looking to profit in either market unless you consider their need to cover for something not stated. Again, still hypothetical and needs more DD.

Feel free to comment on this (be decent, no spam, fud and shills)