$9 Billion Worth Of Bitcoin Moved In Minutes; US-Based Platform To Blame

A whopping 1.3 million Bitcoins (BTC) was processed on Wednesday that instead of causing a massive jolt in the market, went on to go almost unnoticed.

The entire transaction amounted close to $9 billion and was moved in just one hour, which is the highest in the king of crypto's history, according to Rafael Schultze-Kraft, the co-founder of on-chain market intelligence Glassnode. The identity of the person or group of people who transacted those millions of BTCs was almost a mystery, but Glassnode revealed who the "institution" behind it was -- Bittrex.

Glassnode tweeted, "This $8.9 billion spike in on–chain volume was caused by @BittrexExchange moving a large amount of #bitcoin several times – a series of 21 transactions within one hour, each moving ~56,000 $BTC [...]"

The massive volume came ahead of Bittrex schedule maintenance. The exchange announced on Twitter, "#Bittrex Customers: https://bittrex.com will be offline on December 5 for scheduled maintenance which will result in downtime starting at 11:00 AM PT and may last until 12:00 PM PT [...]"

However, there's no exact reason why Bittrex moved such a staggering amount of BTCs even as it completed its Ethereum update and its maintenance on Thursday.

But before the multi-billion Bitcoin transaction, the popular crypto did see a sudden spike to its price in the morning. From a daily low of $7,080, BTC soared to almost a $1,000 gain and set a high of $7,755. Quantum Economics founder Mati Greenspan calls this peculiar, suggesting that this was the handiwork by a single market player -- a Bitcoin whale.

Greenspan deems this as out of the ordinary because of the low volumes the crypto was having recently, and to see such a sudden jump just did not fit the bill. The move was estimated to be worth $400 million.

After hitting its Wednesday high of almost $8,000, BTC wiped off the day's gains. Currently, Bitcoin trades at $7,375 as of press time. In BTC's history, December has somewhat been exceptionally volatile for the crypto with movements in excess of 30% since 2015. Some investors are hoping that the same "Santa Clause rally" in stock markets would be carried over to cryptocurrencies this year.