Signal of the week: Whales and sharks added 45,000 BTC to their wallets in a week, marking the biggest accumulation among top BTC holders since July 2025. Despite rising asset accumulation, leveraged traders are placing their biggest bets against Bitcoin in three years.
The biggest hands in the Bitcoin market just made their most decisive move in almost a year. At the same time, Bitcoin is approaching two price levels that have historically acted as a turning point. What happens at $78,000-$80,000 over the coming days could settle a disagreement that has been building for months.
About the Bitcoin Impact Index
The Bitcoin Impact Index measures which groups of Bitcoin holders are under financial stress, how severe that stress is, and whether it’s severe enough to shake confidence in the market’s direction. It combines on-chain holder behaviour, ETF and derivatives activity, and exchange-level liquidity flows into a single weekly score between 0 and 100. Unlike sentiment indicators, it deliberately excludes social media and volume data to focus on what participants are doing rather than what they are saying.
Score bands:
- Normal Rotation (0–24) — routine profit-taking, no structural shift
- Elevated Repositioning (25–49) — specific groups shifting positions, pressure uneven across the market
- High Impact (50–74) — broad stress across multiple holder groups and institutional flows simultaneously
- Critical Impact (75–100) — full capitulation: LTH losses, large ETF outflows, major liquidations, and heavy exchange inflows at once
Week 16 (April 12–18): BII 37.7 — Elevated Repositioning
The index ticked up slightly from last week but remains in Elevated Repositioning. On a surface, this suggests little has changed, but a closer look shows that the surface starts to crack.
Positive signals: the biggest hands are buying hard
Whales and sharks — holders with between 100 and 10,000 BTC — added 45,000 BTC this week to their wallets. That is the largest single-week accumulation by these cohorts since July 2025, and what makes it particularly notable is that both groups moved in the same direction at once. In recent months they have mostly been accumulating separately, one group buying while the other held flat or sold. This week they bought together, which suggests rising bullish momentum.
As such, long-term holders have now added more than 1 million BTC to their wallets over the past three months, with nearly 500,000 BTC added in the last 30 days — the largest monthly accumulation since May 2025. Historically, long-term holders tend to accumulate during bear markets, so this alone does not confirm a bottom. But the scale and persistence of the buying, continuing even as their holdings move further into loss, suggests increasing conviction rather than opportunistic dip-buying.
Other major positive signals include:
- ETF inflows reached $996 million this week — the strongest week since mid-January.
- Stablecoin inflows grew for the third consecutive week, suggesting increased dry powder to support buying momentum.
- Short-term holders extended their recovery, with their P/L reaching the highest level in 2026.
Mixed signals: shorts are as confident as they have ever been
Against all of that buying, the funding rates hit its most negative reading in three years. This indicates that bearish bias persists among leveraged traders as they’re willing to pay a record premium to bet against Bitcoin. Even the latest series of short liquidations didn’t meaningfully shake this conviction, and it’s now persisted for weeks without the price break they are waiting for. This suggests the situation resolves either into a massive short squeeze or a sharp selloff.
LTH SOPR slipped back below 1, meaning long-term holders who did sell this week primarily did so at a loss. The fact that LTH supply in profit has been quietly shrinking even as price has held stable now becomes one of major structural concerns.
Bitcoin is also approaching its true mean price (around $78,000) and the short-term holder cost basis (around $80,000) — both of which currently act as significant resistance points. The last time Bitcoin pushed above both levels during a bear market phase was briefly in 2018, and the move did not hold. If Bitcoin sustains above both this time, it would change the on-chain picture materially — more holders in profit means less pressure to sell. If it fails, the weight of underwater positions pushes back down.
What could happen next
This week, Bitcoin’s correlation with traditional financial markets reached record levels:
- S&P 500 — the highest correlation since October 2024
- Gold — the highest correlation since September 2025
- US dollar index — the most negative correlation since September 2022.
That means Bitcoin’s price movement is exposed to developments in the US-Iran war, as well as other macroeconomic and geopolitical developments, more than ever this year. Considering the latest “reopening” of the Strait of Hormuz, which leaves some questions on the table, the situation doesn’t seem to be resolved in full and could still bring significant volatility for Bitcoin.
The following price direction would largely depend on whether or not Bitcoin manages to climb above $80,000 in the short term. If successful, this could remove significant stress, potentially supporting its further upside. A rejection at those levels would validate the shorts, shake out recent buyers, and could send the index back toward High Impact territory.
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