This week, the entire cryptocurrency market experienced a rollercoaster of changes, with the BTC price opening above $102,000 but dropping more than $10,000 within two days, reaching its lowest point in weeks.
Altcoins also followed suit; for instance, DOGE came close to $0.4 earlier this week but then fell to $0.31, a pullback of 22%.
XRP briefly broke above $2.5 on January 4 and rose to $2.47 on January 7, but the overall market adjustment caused it to drop to a low of $2.2 on January 9, before retreating to around $2.33 in the past 24 hours.
Such extreme volatility often scares away certain investors, especially retail investors, but whale investors do not react the same way. Data shared by Ali Martinez from Santiment shows that amid this market uncertainty, XRP and DOGE whale investors began hoarding aggressively.
Those holding the largest market cap meme coins increased their holdings of DOGE by over 470 million within just 48 hours. In dollar terms, the total accumulation was approximately $150 million, with an average price of $0.33 per token.
The situation for XRP is more optimistic, as whales purchased over 1 billion tokens during the same time period. The average price was about $2.3, with the total acquisition amount reaching $2.3 billion over two days.
Notably, compared to the last crash when BTC fell again to $91,000 by the end of 2024, both assets did not react as painfully to this overall market crash.
At that time, XRP fell sharply, briefly dropping below $2. So far, during this adjustment, the token's low has risen by 10%, reaching $2.2, possibly driven by the significant buying mentioned above.
The situation for DOGE is similar; on December 30, it plummeted to just above $0.26, while its bottom has now exceeded $0.31.
Therefore, it can be said with certainty that the hoarding by whales helped both assets during the crash, and if they continue to accumulate and the market rebounds in the coming days, they may have a greater impact.
