coindesk.com
Disclosure: The author of this story owns shares in MicroStrategy (MSTR).
Since Donald Trump won the U.S. election on Nov. 5, bitcoin ($BTC) has soared from $67,000 to around $100,000. This has coincided with a huge rise in bitcoin's total trade volume which has now surpassed $100 billion.
According to checkonchain data, bitcoin futures trading volume hit an all-time high of around $120 billion on Nov. 17, almost doubling since the U.S. election. However, since then futures trade volume has plateaued and steadied around $100 billion.
The same can be seen with spot trade volume which has also doubled from around $6 billion to $12 billion. While the spot listed U.S. exchange-traded funds (ETF) trade volume has also picked up reaching $4 billion a day.
Bitcoin remains in a key trading range of $100,000, going above and below the key psychological area on multiple occasions. A lot of this has to do with the enormous sell pressure coming from long-term holders (LTH) or investors who have held bitcoin for longer than 155 days.
Since September, LTHs have sold 843,113 $BTC. In the same period short-term holders (STHs), those who have held bitcoin for less than 155 days, have accumulated 1,081,633 $BTC. This works out to around 9,960 $BTC sold by LTHs and STHs accumulating 12,432 $BTC per day.
To show the difference of trading volumes between long and short-term holders, we compare them to other big players in the industry, such as the self-described bitcoin development company MicroStrategy (MSTR). MicroStrategy holds 423,650 bitcoin or just over 2% of the total supply. In addition, U.S. ETFs now hold over 1 million bitcoin.
Since September, MicroStrategy has accumulated 197,250 $BTC, which works out to roughly 2,168 $BTC per day. While, the U.S ETFs have accumulated approximately 205,000 $BTC, which works out to 2,253 $BTC per day. The U.S. ETF $BTC balance has grown from 916,000 $BTC to 1.12 million $BTC.
In order for bitcoin to conclusively break higher of $100,000 we will need to see LTHs dial down on offloading their tokens or have bigger cohorts enter the space and pick up the buys.