Every industry has some giants whose moves impact things here and there. In any investment-driven sphere, big investors hold great significance. The crypto domain calls them crypto whales. No one’s fully sure who coined this term and where it originated. However, it impeccably fit the profiles of major crypto investors and hence, became popular.
In the crypto space, the influence of crypto whales is huge. So much so that other investors track their movements to make investment strategies. Thus, knowing about these big investors makes total sense.
Crypto Whales: In a Nutshell
A crypto whale could be a person or a company as well. Their holdings can include any sort of crypto like NFTs, meme coins, or regular tokens. Moreover, the size of their holding must be big enough to cause a ripple effect on the asset’s price.
If someone holds 1000BTC or BTC worth $10 Million, the community will consider them a whale. It could be any asset, it’s the value of the asset that matters the most.
There’s no set amount on which one could be considered a whale. It depends on the market size of the particular asset. For example, it may take BTC worth $10 Million for someone to be a Bitcoin whale. On the other hand, the number might be much lesser for an altcoin. Now, there are no fixed parameters for analyzing investors and labeling them whales.
Impact of Whales on Markets
The large amount of assets held by investors makes them major drivers in the markets. The investors as well as the community track their movements. For instance, if an Ethereum whale decides to sell a large stake in their tokens to someone else, the other investors of ETH will instantly speculate that the asset’s price is probably going to crash.
Or something else is happening that would impact its price. Remember, news and rumors play a pivotal role in investment markets. Therefore, steps taken by whales have larger implications.
Whales Impact Liquidity
By holding a large amount of crypto, whales get the power to impact the liquidity of the market. For example, a whale has a large amount of tokens and they haven’t been used for a while. At the same time, if markets run short of that asset, it could lead to a shortage of liquidity. The whale can restore it by using the coin and funneling some of them to the market.
Whales Impact Price
Going by the aforementioned example, a whale can significantly impact the asset’s price. In the past, there have been incidents of whales bringing down prices by dumping their stakes. The magnitude of the impact depends on the volume of assets and other circumstances as well.
According to one particular report, four Bitcoin wallets hold 2.81% of all BTC in 2023. For Dogecoin, fourteen wallets hold over 75% of tokens worth $70 Billion till June 2023. Hence, one can easily gauge the power the crypto whales hold. Mostly, they make things easy for small-time investors.
Source: https://www.thecoinrepublic.com/2023/11/13/everything-one-needs-to-know-about-crypto-whales-their-impact/