German government moves BTC worth $647M – How low will Bitcoin go?

This week, the crypto market witnessed Bitcoin volatility amid sell-offs by the German government. The German Government (BKA) wallet on Arkham Intelligence has loaded on 11,000 more Bitcoin worth $647 million in preparation for the next round of BTC sell-offs.

The German government has resumed transferring bitcoins to centralized crypto exchanges (CEX) and other market institutions with the presumed intent to sell on Wednesday.

German government continues BTC sell-offs

The crypto community has been lingering with the possibility of another crypto winter for a week now. 3 hours ago, the German Government (BKA) crypto wallet moved 6,000 BTC. According to on-chain data from an analytics platform, Arkham, Flow Traders has received over 1,127 bitcoins sent by German authorities.

Source: Arkham Intelligence

After that, the German-linked wallet moved 500 bitcoins to the Coinbase crypto exchange Coinbase, while another 750 were sent to the competitor exchange Kraken. At the same time, Arkham data shows Cumberland DRW had received more than 536 bitcoins from the German government. Finally, a supposed institutional deposit or OTC address received around 2,250 bitcoins.

Source: Arkham Intelligence

This continued move of the 6,000 BTC comes after the outflow of 3,100 BTC worth $178 million – at the time – on July 9, 2024.

In addition, the address withdrew 1,700 BTC worth $91.78 million from Bitstamp, recouping its BTC holdings. The government indicated that it was unable to sell them on the crypto exchange.

In total, the German government has transferred more than 5,853 bitcoins, valued at around $342,694,905. According to Arkham, the government holds more than $1.06 billion in seized bitcoin.

Bitcoin market performance registers volatility

In the last hour, the BKA wallet has moved 5,000 bitoins from its wallet. The government is getting ready to dump BTC worth $293.77 million into the market. The sell-offs from Germany have been a pain to crypto investors. The market volatility has been on a high for 3 weeks now.

Source: Arkham Intelligence

Current on-chain data shows that the average fees associated with each Bitcoin transaction has fallen to 2020 lows. This is the lowest value in four years, standing at $38.69, a figure last seen at the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic.

According to Ycharts data analysis, on July 7, Bitcoin miners processed 673,752 transactions over the Bitcoin network. BTC accounted for 89.7% of transactions, with other protocols taking up the remaining bandwidth, including Ordinals (0.7%), BRC-20 (4.1%), and Runes (5.4%).

CryptoQuant, a market intelligence company, says Bitcoin miners are showing signs of “capitulation” as profit margins squeeze in the post-halving climate and the BTC price dips toward $50,000.

Bitcoin mining hashrate. Source: CryptoQuant

At the time of writing, Bitcoin (BTC) is worth $58,682.60, up 0.3% from an hour ago and 2.3% from yesterday. BTC’s value today is 3.0% lower than it was seven days ago.

On the other hand, the global crypto market cap is now $2.26 trillion, up 1.43% in the last 24 hours and 84.64% from a year ago. As of today, Bitcoin’s market cap stands at $1.16 trillion, reflecting a 51.13% domination. Meanwhile, stablecoins’ market cap is $162 billion, accounting for 7.18% of the overall crypto market cap.

Despite widespread expectations that the German government’s BTC sell-offs will negatively affect the market, the price of the leading crypto has risen more than 2% in the last 24 hours.

Cryptopolitan Reporting by Florence Muchai