Whales are people or companies who hold large amounts of cryptocurrency, often called “crypto whales” or just “whales” in the cryptocurrency community. Cryptocurrency whales hold so much that they can manipulate currency prices. A safe and secure cryptocurrency exchange that lets you buy, sell, and trade Bitcoin
Cryptocurrency whale status is subjective. Many people agree that an account is a whale if it has a lot of coins. A whale accounts for more than 10% of a cryptocurrency’s total number.
Additionally, whales usually affect market prices by either selling or buying a lot of tokens or coins.
Furthermore, crypto whales don’t have to be individuals alone: they can also be institutions or organizations that hold a lot of crypto assets and wield a lot of power.
Crypto whales usually trade over-the-counter (OTC) and keep their transactions off the books. It helps them not overwhelm the market.
Investors with more than 1,000 bitcoins are called Bitcoin whales. Instead of keeping money, the wallet stores cryptographic information for accessing Bitcoin addresses and sending transactions. A Bitcoin wallet can also store other cryptocurrencies. The device that holds your Bitcoin wallet stores the private key, not the coins. Anyone with enough coins or tokens in their wallets can be called a crypto whale. More than 10% of crypto is controlled by whales.
A whale can also buy a significant chunk of a crypto token and take over the platform’s on-chain governance. So they’ll have more voting power, and they’ll be able to dictate how a token should go.
Here Is How Whales Affect The Markets:
Market liquidity: Crypto whales usually store a lot of crypto assets in their wallets. Whales who keep tons of crypto in their wallets reduce the asset’s liquidity. There are fewer circulating cryptos, so there are fewer coins to trade.
Effect on price: Whales can create strong price volatility by trading large quantities of cryptos at once. Especially when it comes to Bitcoin, crypto whales are becoming more common. It was a bitcoin whale that caused the price to surge to a record high of US$20,000 per token in 2017. As well, a user moved 1.1 billion dollars of the cryptocurrency in October 2020, making it one of the largest Bitcoin transactions to date. Although these transactions aren’t all that unusual, what has been interesting is how frequent they have been lately.