With the turn of the new year, it is possible to see more clearly how the drop in the price of Bitcoin (BTC) has hurt the market. One such indicator is the number of wallets with more than $1 million worth of BTC, the “Bitcoin millionaires”. According to a survey, the number of such wallets shrunk by 70,000 addresses last year. In other words, the valuation made 70 thousand investors “lose” the status of millionaires. It should be noted, however, that this refers to general losses, that is, both sales and unrealized losses. Names like Michael Saylor, for example, suffered wealth losses even without selling any BTC last year. It’s been more than a year since BTC’s last all-time high – $68,789 on November 10, 2021. In the past year alone, the cryptocurrency’s price has dropped by 75%, one of the most severe drops in history.
New predictions for BTC
Earlier, traders expected the psychological support at $20,000 to hold until another bull market. However, now that precious support has turned into a new – and strong – resistance for further valuations. As the regulatory consensus takes hold, institutional investors with deep pockets in search of high-performance returns (ROI) are ready to drive the luck of the BTC markets. But the price must fall further before returning to the positive territory. One estimate by analyst Mark Mobius, who made his name trading at Franklin Templeton Investments, is that the price of Bitcoin will drop another 70%, reaching $10,000. He bases his assumption on rising interest rates and tightening central bank policy this year. Still, other analysts have bullish projections. They range from $50,000 in the third or fourth quarter, according to Professor Carol Alexander (University of Sussex), to Tim Draper’s $250,000 per BTC. But Draper’s prediction seems unlikely in the medium term. Draper reasons that when women start to embrace BTC, that’s when the price will make that move. According to the investor, most of the potential money is in the hands of the female public. “My assumption is that since women control 80% of retail spending and only 1 in 7 BTC wallets are currently held by women, the dam is about to break,” he said.
Blockchain data indicates tough times
Meanwhile, the on-chain data reveals a drastically different Bitcoin ecosystem than the one full of capital and volume during the bubble that ended in 2021. At that time, the total market cap of BTC was $1 trillion and there was plenty of cash and liquidity. in the markets. With that, investors put in ever-increasing sums, which led the cryptocurrency to reach new records. On-chain data revealed that the number of Bitcoin addresses with $1 million or more crossed the threshold of 100,000 two years ago – which represented a 400% increase from the level of 25,000 five months earlier. But the story is different in 2023. Today there are only 24,391 of these addresses on the market, i.e. 70,000 less BTC millionaires. This does not necessarily mean that there are a lot less millionaires. It is possible that they spread their holdings across more addresses. But overall, this decrease was due to the fall in cryptocurrency prices. If they rise again, with renewed interest from professional and retail investors, especially in large institutional funds, millionaires could rise.
