China, which happens to be a crypto whale according to this CEO, currently owns more Bitcoin than leading institutional investors like MicroStrategy, Galaxy Digital Holdings and Tesla.
The Asian nation, which continues to enforce a total ban of the digital asset class, became the de facto owner/holder of 194,000 Bitcoin and 833,000 Ethereum tokens it seized from the infamous crackdown against the 2019 PlusToken Ponzi Scheme.
“They forfeited these $6 billion worth assets to the national treasury,” Ki Young Ju, CEO of analytics platform CryptoQuant, said.
Based on data released by CryptoQuant, MicroStrategy has 130,000 BTC while Galaxy Digital Holdings own 40,000 units of the maiden crypto.
Voyager Digital holds 12,260 BTCs while Tesla, the electric car company of new Twitter owner Elon Musk, has 10,725 Bitcoin under its portfolio.
Combined, the four companies account for 192,985 Bitcoin holdings, more than 1,000 units short of how much China currently has.
China, the Asian economic powerhouse, is a “crypto whale,” Young Ju said.
FUN FACT: Government of China?? is a crypto whale.
Chinese authorities seized 194k BTC, 833k ETH, and others from the PlusToken scam in 2019. They forfeited these $6 billion-worth assets to the national treasury.
FWIW, MicroStrategy has 130k $BTC. pic.twitter.com/Ilqp7EnenL
— Ki Young Ju (@ki_young_ju) November 2, 2022
Crypto Whale China Has Capability To Drag Bitcoin To $5K
When the Terra (LUNA) platform collapsed, there was tremendous sell-side liquidity that pulled BTC down from $30,000 to $17,000.
Young Ju said during that time, assets sold equaled to 80,000 Bitcoin. Now, if the silent crypto whale China chooses to sell all of its 194,000 BTC holdings, it would put the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization into a steep fall, pulling its spot trading price to $5,000, or even lower.
As a result, the entire cryptocurrency market will be wiped out of billions worth of overall valuation, “killing” the industry that is currently struggling to get out of a slump that was caused by the FTX collapse.
Young Ju was asked about the potential consequences of the Chinese government selling its confiscated Bitcoin and he responded that it might be a bit insane.
“Imagine they start dumping 194,000 Bitcoin to kill crypto markets.”
Mighty Bitcoin Continues To Struggle
Meanwhile, over the last seven days, Bitcoin, which now appears to be an added arsenal for China, lost almost 18% of its value, trading at $16,937 according to tracking from Coingecko at the time of this writing.
After successfully reclaiming the $21K territory, BTC, along with its fellow cryptocurrencies, were caught in the middle of an unfortunate situation involving two of the world’s largest crypto exchanges, Binance and FTX.
The wave of negativity that emanated from this development affected the entire crypto market as its market capitalization fell below the $1 trillion turf once again. At press time, the overall valuation of the market stood at $804 billion.
With its vulnerable state right now, the cryptocurrency market wouldn’t survive the kind of damage that experts predict if crypto whale China moves to sell all of its Bitcoin.
Luckily, right now, there seems to be no indication that the Asian superpower is headed towards that direction.
Crypto total market cap at $801 billion on the daily chart | Featured image from Watcher Guru, Chart: TradingView.com