Most old timers who have HODLed for years are not bothered by the price action, but for someone like me who started doing so about a year ago, the current bull market might feel lackluster. I started after the election, and have DCA’ed whenever possible, with an average price of ~$95k. For the entire year of 2025, we’ve seen so many bullish tailwinds — a U.S. President who is widely seen as crypto-friendly, increasing institutional adoption, the narrative shifting toward “digital gold,” the GENIUS Act, and the list goes on. But the price hasn’t reflected all these changes. My post is about bitcoin only, but other coins tend to follow bitcoin.
We all know markets can be influenced by big players, but here’s my explanation of how that influence can work.
Institutions and large whales typically avoid executing very large trades directly on public order books; instead they often use over-the-counter (OTC) desks to arrange big blocks privately. OTC desks match buyers and sellers or provide liquidity so the trade doesn’t show up immediately on an exchange order book. CoinDesk+1 Because OTC trades hide the size of the order from the public market and reduce slippage, institutions generally prefer private execution so their purchases don’t move the visible market price. This preference is widely documented and helps explain why large buyers don’t always appear on exchange order books. CoinDesk+1 It’s often said — and some institutional participants (Michael Saylor) have described this publicly — that institutions like to buy without dramatic price swings around execution. They care more about getting large blocks filled with limited market impact than about buying at an exact $X price. (This is an observed trading preference, not a conspiracy claim.) YouTube+1 Market makers and liquidity providers can dampen volatility by providing buy and sell liquidity, but saying they are “deliberately suppressing volatility” as a proven fact is too strong; it’s better to phrase it as a commonly held explanation for observed lower volatility (and a debated one at that). A plausible mechanism is: large sellers or liquidity providers may transact small amounts on exchanges (particularly in thin hours) while larger OTC buys are happening behind the scenes. That pattern — small visible selling versus large hidden buying — could blunt public upside while inventory moves into long-term custody. This is speculative (plausible, supported by market structure logic) rather than empirically proven for every instance. On-chain / market-structure data show OTC desk balances and exchange reserves have trended lower in 2025, with OTC balances reported around the ~150–160k BTC range recently and exchange balances also falling — a tightening of visible supply that analysts have flagged as potentially significant. If private (OTC) and exchange inventories continue to shrink, that reduces the amount of immediately available BTC for sale. Bitget+2Cointelegraph+2 If available supply on both OTC desks and exchanges falls to very low levels while demand (from ETFs, corporate treasuries, and other long-term buyers) continues or accelerates, price sensitivity to new demand could increase — i.e., smaller incremental demand could move the price more, producing higher volatility and stronger upward moves. That’s the “supply shock” scenario people talk about. Cointelegraph+1 What could accelerate this? Continued declines in OTC and exchange balances plus broader macro narratives that treat bitcoin more like a hard or risk-off asset (akin to gold) would help — and of course macro conditions (a recession or major equity selloff) could push investors toward store-of-value allocations that include bitcoin. I also think the neat 4-year halving cycle dynamic may be less deterministic going forward if demand growth (ETFs, corporate treasuries, institutional allocations) outstrips the supply reduction signal from halvings. That’s an opinion informed by observed increases in institutional demand. AInvest+1Bottomline: Please don’t sell right now. Do what the whales are doing — accumulate as much as possible and just HODL.
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