Why Over 18M BTC Have Been Taken Off Exchanges

There are now 18.19 million Bitcoins on the market, and just 1.16 million of them are located on trading platforms. This statistic is due to a drastic uptick in BTC withdrawals from centralized exchanges that followed the collapse of FTX last month.

According to statistics from the crypto analytics site Santiment, the number of BTC outside exchanges has been steadily growing over the past several months. The most recent statistic of 1.16 million represents the lowest level of its supply on exchanges since November 2018.

This trend has been ongoing due to investors have had to deal not just with failures specifically related to cryptocurrencies but also with increasing interest rates that have put pressure on risk assets. 

Additionally, they are moving toward self-custody since their confidence in centralized exchanges has diminished after the FTX collapse. However, the 10-year long-term view of Bitcoin’s funds travelling on and off exchanges was illustrated by Santiment in a recent tweet. 

It founds that the quantity of coins under self-custody has reached a new all-time high with 18.2M $BTC. At 1.2 million $BTC, coins on exchanges are at a 4-year low.

Bitcoin (BTC) Price Sinks 75% From Its ATH

The largest coin by market cap, Bitcoin, is currently trading at $16,841.80 and has losses on both the daily and weekly charts, according to data from CoinMarketcap. Additionally, a significant decline of roughly 20% can be seen in its 24-hour trading volume.

The data also shows that since hitting an all-time high of about $69,000 in November 2021, BTC has fallen by around 75%. Beginning in 2022, a new crypto winter saw the price of digital currencies plummet significantly. In response, many well-known companies were forced to close up shops.

Investors had a difficult time predicting the future price of Bitcoin during this tumultuous year. People began making predictions at the beginning of the year, but as December rolled around, their expectations worsened.

Ian Harnett, co-founder and CIO at macro research firm Absolute Strategy Research, predicted earlier this year that BTC would most likely drop as low as $13,000. 

He reasoned that in crypto rallies past, BTC has often dropped about 80% off its all-time high. So back in 2018, for example, it lost close to $3,000 after reaching a peak of nearly $20,000 in late 2017. Though it is closer than most, BTC still has to drop another 22% to hit Harnett’s forecast.

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