Despite surging prices, Bitcoin investors are rapidly locking up their BTC for the long-term, with 270,000 BTC being taken out of liquid supply in the last 30 days.

According to data published past crypto market data aggregator Glassnode, "liquid" Bitcoin wallets have shed 270,000 BTC over the by month, upwardly from 175,000 Bitcoin at the beginning of January.

Bitcoin Monthly Liquid Supply Modify. Source: Glassnode

The data shows that Bitcoin's (BTC) liquid supply has consistently fallen over the last ix months, with liquid supply currently sitting at 21.iii% and showing no signs of reversing.

Bitcoin's increasingly illiquid supply could exist bullish for its cost, with new retail and institutional traders vying for an increasingly diminishing supply. Glassnode estimates that nearly 80% of the eighteen.half dozen million circulating Bitcoin are currently stored in "illiquid" wallets.

According to Glassnode, a Bitcoin wallet is considered illiquid if less than 25% of the Bitcoin received has been transferred out beyond the entity's life. In contrast, to be deemed highly liquid, the majority of Bitcoin must be transferred back into apportionment, with less than 25% of the inflows held onto.

Bitcoin liquidity supply. Source: Glassnode

Of the 3.9 million BTC Glassnode describes equally existence highly liquid, 61% or 2.38 million is held by centralized exchanges. Their balances have also been dropping, with data from analytics firm CryptoQuant indicating exchanges' reserves have shrunk by 13.eight% since July.

Increasing institutional investment may be a pregnant strength driving the depletion of Bitcoin's liquid supply, with wallet tracking service Bitcoin Treasuries currently estimates that 33 institutional entities have accumulated more i.2 million BTC or half-dozen.5% of Bitcoin's circulating supply.

In the terminal few days, Grayscale has increased its holdings by approximately 25,000 BTC with a portfolio of 641,523.vii BTC equally of January twenty, 2021. To put this in perspective, approximately 900 Bitcoin are minted each day. According to Glassnode, however, on average only one-3rd of those are actually being sent to exchanges since July 2020.

Data from Investment firm SwissBorg shows that in the 2nd one-half of 2020, institutional investors purchased on boilerplate more than 230% of the newly minted BTC. Adding in the purchases from PayPal and Square (along with the estimated corporeality of Bitcoin lost each twenty-four hours) demand could exist running as loftier as 500% of the new supply.

Before today, the globe's largest asset manager BlackRock filed with the SEC, list Bitcoin Derivatives every bit a possible investment. The business firm entered 2021 with $7.81 trillion in avails nether direction, more than vii times crypto's entire marketplace cap.