As of press time, BTC is trading at $19,887 with a market cap of $380 billion. As per the latest development, a Bitcoin whale address has become active for the first time in nine years and moved 5,000 Bitcoins worth $100 million to crypto exchange Kraken. Citing data from OKLink, a popular crypto reporter Colin Wu stated:
The Bitcoin whale address (18xGHNrU26w6HSCEL8DD5o1whfiDaYgp6i ) transferred out 5000.01 BTC at 04:50:38 (UTC+8) on September 5th to the Kraken, which is worth about $100m now. The wallet was created and bitcoins were transferred to this address in 2013.
Bitcoin continued to stay under pressure after last week’s unemployment report in the U.S. Bitcoin has been trading under $20,000 for the ninth consecutive day but continues to hold above $19,511, its then-record peak from December 2017. The December 2017 high could act as crucial support going ahead for Bitcoin. On Sunday, September 4, Gavekal Research sent a report noting:
“The Fed is busy ‘burning’ money as well (a.k.a. quantitative tightening) to restore the credibility of the US dollar. That presents a significant headwind for all cryptocurrencies.”
Bitcoin Lightning Capacity Hit New ATH
Last week, the Bitcoin Lightning Network capacity touched an all-time high of close to 5,000 Bitcoins. The Lightning Network is the Layer-2 scalability solution for the Bitcoin network making transactions faster and cheaper.
Interestingly, Michal Saylor’s MicroStrategy has been working to onboard a large number of users to the Lightning Network. Speaking at the Baltic Honeybadger conference in Riga, Latvia, on Saturday, September 3, Saylor called Lightning as “the most important thing going on in the world in technology”. He further added:
“MicroStrategy has got some R&D projects going on right now where we’re working on enterprise applications of Lightning: enterprise Lightning wallet, enterprise Lightning servers, enterprise authentication”.
He said that this step would allow companies to “roll out Lightning to a hundred thousand employees every day”. It would also be possible to open 10 million Lightning wallets overnight said Saylor.