Eight years ago today, on October 6, 2014, as the price of bitcoin was coasting along at $330 per unit, an anonymous bitstamp trader placed an order to sell 30,000 bitcoins. Additionally, the trader, now infamous as the “Bear Whale,” sold the coins for $300 per unit, putting extreme pressure on the emerging bitcoin market, whose global trading volume was approximately $29 million per day.
See the Bitcoin “Bear Whale Incident” of October 2014
With Bitcoin (BTC)trading just below $20K territory, nearly eight years ago today, Bitcoin tradersfaced offwith the infamous “Bear Whale.” It was October 6, 2014, when an anonymous trader decided to sell $30,000of BTCfor $300 per coin in a single transaction.
At the time, the trader was looking to earn $9 million from the sale, but today those bitcoins are worth roughly $603 million. When this happened, the crypto community was in a frenzy, evenreceiving mainstream media attention. The price of bitcoin just prior to Bear Whale’s infamous dump was about $330, and traders’ dubious $300 sell wall was gobbled up by market traders that day.
Five years ago, Bear Whaleallegedly posted on Reddit claiming that it was hisaddressthat sold the coinsand that he also acquired bitcoins for $8 per unit. He also noted that he had made an urgent transaction of 30,000BTCthat day. He stated that he made the 30,000 BTCtransaction in a hurry that day because he wanted to get away from his desktop.
“I could have gotten a better price if I spent more time working the order I guess,” Bear Whale told the r/bitcoin Reddit community at the time.” I didn’t want to just sit in front of a computer all day, so I set up a wall.” Bear Whale added.
Almost immediately after the anonymous Bitstamp trader made the sale, the crypto communitynamed the seller Bear Whaleand created a meme around the notorious bitcoin seller. The name Bear Whale was in honor of the infamous London Whale. The name Bear Whale is in honor of London Whale , a trader at JPMorgan Chase who lost $6.2 billion on an errant trade. Bitcoiners mythologized the incident by saying that the community “brought down” the fearsome beast on October 6, 2014.
“I feel like singing that whale meat song.” One bitcoinersaidafter the selling wall was defeated.” haha, so the whale lost almost a million bucks by selling it all at 300 instead of piecing it and selling around 325,” another of the r/bitcoin wrote
The community thought it was a crazy battle by market forces It was thought to be a battle, but Bear Whale mentioned in a Reddit post that it was just a loss of faith in the major digital currencies of the time. Allegedly, Bear Whale came out with his identity because of the scaling debate, and then, whileBitcoin (BTC)was trading at just over a nominal US$1000 per coin, he “o deal in bitcoin again atRuin
,” he said.
The takeaway from Bear Whale’s story is that there is a good chance the big whales will lose faith inBTCagain, or they may want to dump billions of dollars worth of bitcoin at the right price point. But the market is much stronger than it was in 2014, when average daily volume was about$29 million
Currently, the 24-hour global trading volume forBTCis approximately $32.63 billionat the time of this writing, 112,425% larger than thedaily trading volume in 2014.BTCvolume, as Brendan O’Connor , managing director of Secondmarket, toldeight years ago at the time. CNBC that the move was “a very ‘immature’ way to liquidate that amount of coins.”
O’Connor further stressed that it ruined his Sunday. He said, “Let me tell you, it makes no sense at all from a transactional standpoint. It’s the last way in the world you would actually want to liquidate such a big position,” O’Connor told news reporters on October 9, 2014.
Image credits: Shutterstock, Pixabay, Wiki Commons, Christopher Edwin Steininger, Luis Buenaventura, Reddit.