What Caused the Recent Crypto Market Drop – Whales, Elon, Kraken

Lets take a look at what might have caused the recent drop in the crypto market – with Bitcoin dropping from around A$70k to A$60k.

Please feel free to leave comments on the Twitter thread if you think we may have missed something.

Bitcoin Whales

Big Whales (over 100 million to 1 billion dollars) transferred from unknown wallets (presumably cold storage) into crypto Exchanges on 23rd February, where they could be selling or trading in the open market – affecting the crypto prices. Here are some of the recent ones.

🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 7,731 #BTC (414,758,284 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

Tx: https://t.co/XDaw8WPp3r

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 22, 2021

🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 5,000 #BTC (276,113,787 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to #Bitstamp

Tx: https://t.co/IeeTN38Pr6

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 22, 2021

🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 🚨 2,941 #BTC (160,121,040 USD) transferred from unknown wallet to unknown wallet

Tx: https://t.co/5vhNZkA8eC

— Whale Alert (@whale_alert) February 22, 2021

This news also follows some recent related news we covered, where a Bitcoin Whale Moves AU$1 Billion of BTC into Storage.

Elon Musk and Peter Shifft

In a friendly conversation on Twitter, Elon suggested that Bitcoin price might be high. Peter has been tweeting to everyone famous recently saying how much he hates Bitcoin and loves Gold. There is nothing new there, but when Elon says the price might be a bit high, that could have prompted some people to take profits. Also on a side note, Elon called Peter an eggplant emoji – which everyone found hilarious. And now it seems Peter has put it in his profile name. Haha.

Two weeks after @elonmusk announced that he spent $1.5 billion of shareholder money buying Bitcoin, #Tesla stock entered a bear market, plunging 20% from its all-time high set on Jan. 25th, and 16% since disclosing the #Bitcoin buy. Not an example other CEOs will likely follow!

— Peter Schiff (@PeterSchiff) February 22, 2021

That said, BTC & ETH do seem high lol

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 20, 2021

Kraken BTC Sell off

Kraken is investigating the Bitcoin sell off with CEO Jesse Powell stating in a Bloomberg interview (below) that there was a massive Bitcoin sell off on Kraken in the past few days, which caused many liquidations on margin positions. He stated that Kraken might have been hit harder than other exchanges because it provides margin trading. And they would investigate why this happened…

Conclusions

This recent pull back might be the first time new crypto traders have seen such a “big” drop. Having been studying this market for quite a few years now and seeing many drops before – has led me to be humble, take profits and never over extend my positions.