The total number of bitcoins held in cryptocurrency exchanges wallets dropped to an 18-month low just above 2.3 million on Monday, according to data estimates from Glassnode. The decline marks an 11% year-to-date reduction in the number of bitcoins held by exchanges.
Meanwhile, over the same period, the amount of ether in exchange wallets increased by more than 7%. Some market participants see this as a sign that more bitcoin investors are increasingly taking direct possession of their cryptocurrency.
“People are accumulating aggressively, and the market participants seem to have a higher time preference these days,” said Avi Felman, head of trading at Stamford, Conn.-based BlockTower Capital. “I think the trend is going to continue.”
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A portion of these active and often ideologically motivated bitcoin accumulators are called “holders of last resort,” a label implying they never intend to sell regardless of market movements.
This type of investor partially contributes to the decline in exchange bitcoin balances by continuing to “accumulate for the long term and self-custody their bitcoins,” said Pierre Rochard, bitcoin strategist at Kraken, the largest U.S.-based cryptocurrency exchange by liquidity according to Cryptowatch.
Speaking with CoinDesk, Rochard added that “improvements in fiat rails” also materially contribute to this trend by enabling arbitrage traders to “be more capital efficient and thus hold fewer bitcoin.”
Source: Bityard (https://support.bityard.com/hc/en-us/articles/900001070983-Number-of-Bitcoins-on-Crypto-Exchanges-Hits-18-Month-Low)