Bitcoin price drops to $23K in minutes despite huge new Grayscale buy-in

Bitcoin (BTC) fell by almost $1,000 in under an hour on Dec. 23 as spot markets refused to buy fresh good news from institutional investors.

BTC price spooked near $24,000 sell wall

Data from Cointelegraph Markets, Coin360 and TradingView showed a surprise bearish trading session for Bitcoin on Wednesday, which hit local lows of $22,800.

It took less than sixty minutes for BTC/USD to descend from highs of $23,718, reaffirming volatility as a feature of the current landscape as well as the selling pressure surrounding $24,000.

At press time, the pair circled $23,000 as the market took a brief respite to determine direction before Wall Street opened.

Grayscale adds $284 million of BTC in one day

The move contrasts with bullish accumulation continuing from institutional quarters, with Grayscale adding more BTC to its assets under management on Tuesday than the entire previous week combined. That week-long accumulation, although lower, still witnessed a new all-time high for Bitcoin.

Grayscale added 12,319 BTC ($284.5 million) on Tuesday, while last week’s tally was 11,512 BTC ($266.1 million). For context, Bitcoin miners are currently able to release around 28,000 BTC per month in block rewards.

“Bad news for Bitcoin bears,” analyst Kevin Rooke commented on Grayscale’s continued commitment to Bitcoin buy-ins.

As Cointelegraph reported, MicroStrategy, which now owns over 70,000 BTC, reportedly did not move the market with lump-sum buying last week when it upped its reserves by $650 million.

Wednesday meanwhile saw further signs of fresh institutional deals, with Coinbase seeing a sudden large outflow in what one analyst suspected was another over-the-counter (OTC) purchase.

“12,006 $BTC flowed out from Coinbase a few hours ago. As I said, it went to custody-looked-like wallets,” Ki Young Ju, CEO of on-chain analytics platform CryptoQuant, tweeted.

“It seems that Coinbase makes a new cold wallet for each customer after the OTC deal for institutions. I'm very bullish on $BTC.”