Bitcoin is in one of its most uncertain times of the year.
The upcoming halving is less than 100 days away, the miners are trying to sell as much as they can before then, and the price of the cryptocurrency itself is showing a strange reluctance to cross $45,000.
It can be helpful to understand what's going on with Bitcoin under the hood sometimes. Just as a way to understand where its price might be headed within certain timeframes.
With that in mind, here are some of the strangest and most interesting happenings on Bitcoin this week:
Microstrategy, one of the companies most bullish on Bitcoin, may have bought an additional 850 Bitcoin in January, worth about $38 million according to a Bloomberg report.
This new addition to the company's portfolio means that MicroStrategy has amassed a total BTC hoard of 190,000 BTC, worth a staggering $8.1 billion.
This makes the company the largest publicly traded holder of the flagship cryptocurrency.
Microstrategy's Bitcoin bet started in December 2020 as part of its capital allocation plan. Back then, the company revealed that it had paid $250 million for 21,454 BTC.
So far, MicroStrategy has more than quadrupled its BTC investment in less than two years, with an average buy price of $33,580 per Bitcoin it holds.
At the time of writing, MicroStrategy has made no announcements that it plans to stop buying BTC, and could be up by billions in profit when the Bitcoin bull run starts.
The rising acceptance of BTC by institutional investors over the past year has been one of the biggest factors driving its price.
A new report from CoinShares has just shown that during the last week of January, there was a significant $703 million influx into BTC investment products, which totalled a whopping 99% of all crypto inflows.
This shows that institutional investors are now increasing their holdings, and are still optimistic about BTC.
Overall, the report shows that a new record of $53 billion was bought in the global AUM for financial products including BTC.
In even better news, the outflows that plagued Grayscale's GBTC ETF, have also slowed down considerably recently, showing that stakeholders are now choosing to HODL, rather than sell them on the secondary market.
Conversely, there were slight withdrawals from short-Bitcoin products, which benefit from declining prices, suggesting that there has now been a major bullish shift In investor sentiment.
In other bearish news, miners may be bailing all of the inflows and dollar-cost averaging out the window in bucketfuls.
According to a recent report from BitFinex, the rate at which the miners are selling BTC may be a major reason behind the cryptocurrency's sluggish price movement.
According to this chart from CryptoQuant, since the launch of the BTC ETFs in mid-January, there have been massive net outflows from miner reserves.
As shown above, miner reserves have now dropped to their lowest point since June 2021 (red spikes).
BitFinex's report alleges that miners may have taken advantage of Bitcoin's two-year high price increase by transferring about $1 billion worth of BTC to crypto exchanges on January 12—the day after the ETF launches.
However, before we grab the pitchforks and torches, BitFinex says that the miners may have a very good reason for selling.
"Selling [BTC] now provides the capital for miners to upgrade infrastructure and is a reminder of the significant influence on market liquidity and price discovery that miners have,"
In essence, the miners need these funds to upgrade their machinery in order to meet up with the demands of the next bull cycle.
BitFinex says that the miners' persistent selling pressure may have contributed to BTC's recent price sluggishness, with many efforts to break through $44,000 being met with resistance.
Disclaimer: Voice of Crypto aims to deliver accurate and up-to-date information, but it will not be responsible for any missing facts or inaccurate information. Cryptocurrencies are highly volatile financial assets, so research and make your own financial decisions.