CryptoQuant warned Bitcoin whale accumulation has stalled, echoing patterns seen before the 2022 bear market.
Bitcoin News
Bitcoin (BTC) whale accumulation has stalled at its fastest pace this year, according to a report published May 28 by on-chain analytics firm CryptoQuant. Head of Research Julio Moreno said whale wallet balances are contracting year-over-year. He said the contraction mirrors the pattern seen during the 2022 bear market.
CryptoQuant defines whales as wallets holding between 1,000 and 10,000 BTC, excluding exchanges and mining pools. That exclusion is applied to isolate genuine investor behavior. Dolphins are defined as wallets holding between 100 and 1,000 BTC, a group Moreno said is largely made up of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and corporate BTC treasury firms.
Monthly balance growth for both whales and dolphins is now simultaneously near zero. Dolphin monthly growth has been recording lower highs since September 2025. Whale monthly growth has remained flat since February 2026. Moreno described the current posture of large non-exchange holders as "neutral-to-slight-distribution."
Long-Term Holder Supply Hits Record 15.8M BTC
Dolphin balance growth peaked at a positive 0.97 million BTC on an annual basis in October 2025. Since then, growth has fallen well below trend. Moreno said the data "confirms that the structural demand engine of this cycle is in a sustained slowdown."
Long-term holder supply has reached a record 15.8 million BTC. Moreno cautioned against reading that number as a bullish signal. He explained that long-term holder supply rises when coins are not changing hands at scale, meaning short-term demand is too weak to absorb coins from existing holders. More investors are simply holding rather than new buyers entering the market, he said.
Short-term holder supply has also dropped sharply. It fell from 6.4 million BTC in December 2025 to around 4.2 million BTC at the time of the report, a decline of more than 2.1 million BTC. Moreno said roughly 900,000 BTC of that drop came from Coinbase exchange reserves aging past the 155-day threshold and mechanically shifting into the long-term holder category. He said that shift did not represent genuine new demand entering the #Bitcoin market.
Moreno has issued repeated warnings in recent weeks that current conditions closely resemble the setup seen ahead of the March 2022 bear market, when #whale accumulation first went flat before turning negative. BTC has fallen sharply from its October 2025 peak above $126,000 and was trading around $73,400 at the time of the report. Periods when whale and dolphin monthly balance growth both approach zero have historically been followed by #BTCprice weakness, as these cohorts represent the primary source of structural demand support in the market.
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