#美联储连续第七次维持基准利率不变 #BTC☀
Who is selling BTC?
Generally speaking, there are two types of non-neutral sellers in the market: one is the OG (old gun) group, which refers to the old BTC participants who have accumulated a large number of low-cost chips; the other is the miners group, who will produce BTC net and are forced to sell BTC due to the cost pressure brought by the consumption of computing power, thereby increasing the market supply.
When the halving event occurs every four years, miners will either actively adjust their production plans or passively respond to the sudden increase in costs and sell a large number of BTC to the market, which often causes the market price to retrace before and after the halving.
Since the bull market in 2017, the situation has changed. The rise of the contract (futures) market has introduced a large number of "naked short" sellers to the market. They do not hold any BTC spot, only US dollars, and sell "non-existent" BTC in the market. These BTC are also called "paper BTC".
Figure 1 shows us the impact of "paper BTC" on the entire market in a bull-bear cycle since the bear market in 2020.
From the light blue curve at the bottom of the figure, we can see that if "paper BTC" is added, the total amount of paper BTC plus spot BTC shown by the purple curve reached a local peak in the late bull market in 2021 until the bottom of the bear market in 2022.
It can be said that every comeback of paper BTC will lead to a local market retracement.
On the other hand, most ETFs are not long-term hoarders, but hedge funds use them as tools for speculative arbitrage. It is estimated that up to 2/3 of ETF inflows come from hedge funds' spot-futures arbitrage transactions.
In this way, part of the net outflow of spot from crypto exchanges actually goes to ETFs. This is a change of soup but not medicine, moving the arbitrage transactions originally in crypto exchanges to ETFs and the US stock market.
The gameplay has not changed. The people who make money and the people who earn fees have changed. Originally, it was the crypto exchanges that made money. Now it is Wall Street that makes money.
It’s just that the spot market is suffering. Those who are eagerly looking forward to BTC’s continued record highs need to be more patient and wait for more real long-term hoarders and long-term investment funds to enter.
