Bitcoin Miners Offloaded Holdings as Prices Dropped to $33K

Bitcoin miners sold part of their holdings over the past 30 days after months of accumulation, data from multiple sources show.

• Miner net position change shows the net change in bitcoin supply held by miner addresses. Red bars indicate periods of sale, while green bars indicate periods of accumulation.
• The metric decreased by more than 1,660 bitcoins on Saturday and 1,733 bitcoins on Sunday, according to analytics tool Glassnode. This amounts to over $147 million at current prices, according to tracking tool CoinGecko.
• The weekend’s sale was the first for 2022, after a previous selling period in November.
• Over the past two months, miners have been continuously accumulating bitcoin even as prices fell from $55,000 to $35,000, research firm Delphi Digital said in a daily note.
• “With the weekend pump, miners are starting to offload their BTC holdings as Miner Net Position Change turned negative for the first time in 2 months,” the analysts wrote.
• The sale over the past 30 days likely contributed to a decline in bitcoin prices, as the asset touched $32,000 in the last week of January. It has since recovered, trading as high as $45,570 on Tuesday.
• Bitcoin mining is the process of discovering new blocks, verifying transactions and adding them to the Bitcoin blockchain.
• A miner broadly describes an entity using powerful computing resources to validate the network and earn bitcoin as a reward in return. The upkeep of such systems is expensive, and miners periodically sell holdings to cover costs.