1. The Awakening of the "Old Whales" (December 2025)
One of the most impactful events of this month has been the movement of wallets that were inactive for over a decade.
**Bitcoins of the "Satoshi Era": The movement of more than 62,800 BTC (with an age of over 7 years) was detected.
Featured case: A whale moved 80,000 BTC in a single transaction, traceable back to 2011. At that time, they were worth about $210,000; today they represent a fortune of billions, with a value increase of nearly 4,000,000%.
2. Massive Accumulation in Altcoins (December 2025)
While Bitcoin has struggled to stay above $90,000, whales have taken the opportunity to "load their bags" with other coins:
Ripple (XRP): It has been the favorite of whales this month. Large holders have added over $2,400 million in XRP, aggressively accumulating even as the price rose.
Ethereum (ETH): Recently (December 20), a single whale bought 5,678 ETH (approx. $17 million) in just one hour, signaling the beginning of a new accumulation phase after a previous profit-taking.
Cardano (ADA): Whales with over a billion tokens have accumulated nearly 280 million additional ADA over the past few weeks.
3. Transfers to Exchanges (Sell or Trading Signals)
When whales move funds from their private wallets to exchanges like Binance, it is often interpreted as an intention to sell or engage in active trading.
Movement on Binance: On December 17, a transfer of 3,000 BTC (over $260 million) was recorded to Binance from wallets linked to Matrixport infrastructure.
Asset reassignment: In total, it is estimated that in December Bitcoin whales have reassigned assets worth around $3,370 million, moving capital between different platforms to adjust their portfolios for the year-end.
4. The Largest Whales of 2025
To understand who is behind these movements, here are the entities that dominate the market this year:
Institutional: BlackRock and Fidelity have consolidated their position as giant whales through their ETFs, managing over 300,000 and 180,000 BTC respectively.
Companies: MicroStrategy remains the leading corporate whale, surpassing 226,000 BTC in its treasury.
Governments: The U.S. and China governments continue to feature in the top with over 190,000 BTC each, whose movements often cause panic due to fears of massive liquidations.
These movements suggest that, although there is a natural year-end profit-taking, whales are betting heavily on a bullish 2026, especially in high-cap altcoins.
