According to new research from OKEx Insights and Catallact, when the Covid-19 pandemic started, retail and institutional investors adopted very different BTC buying strategies.
The study looked at on-chain BTC transaction data from January to the beginning of August 2020 and found that retail investors decided to hang back and take a ‘wait and see’ approach. By contrast, the larger investors, who are largely institutional, started accumulating BTC.
The report noted that retail transactions, which are mostly for less than one-tenth of a Bitcoin, made up the majority of transactions, and that these buyers track the price fluctuations closely. However, as the report says, “these investors tend to be more easily “‘shaken out’ of the market in times of high volatility and dramatic price declines.”
Cointelegraph says, “Based on the data, retail transactions “decreased and deviated away from the price’s trend — suggesting that retail investors took a wait-and-see approach as BTC a season-long, post-crash accumulation period” around May. “
Interestingly, medium-sized transactions, usually attributed to miners and larger retail investors were cautious at the beginning of the pandemic, but this behavior ended in June, and they started buying more aggressively again.
The big transactions of over 1,000 BTC tell an even more interesting story: “As BTC approach $10,000, the number of transactions between 1,000 and 5,000 BTC continued to go up since the end of June even as the price began to consolidate. “
The report commented on this saying: “This upward trend suggests the possibility that institutions and/or large players got busy accumulating BTC as economic stimulus measures from central banks spurred on the purchase of hard assets. However, because we cannot cleanly differentiate what actual activity took place from the number of transactions alone, this only remains a speculative possibility.”
Basically, the report shows that the first few months of the pandemic impacted how people moved within the market, particularly as retail investors pulled back to await prices going back to normal again. Large investors, on the other hand, “bought the dip” and began accumulating BTC.
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https://medium.com/@lendoplatformltd/bitcoin-buying-strategies-during-covid-19-e2cc013e508e
