Bitcoin has become an even more attractive investment instrument in the past few months as its price has grown substantially. The number of BTC hodlers with at least 1,000 coins has surged to new highs, according to new data.
Bitcoin has been on a tear since early October resulting in several consecutive yearly highs. The latest one took BTC to nearly $19,000. Meaning, that the cryptocurrency has almost doubled its value in less than two months.
Typically, such impressive price developments attract attention and this time is no different according to data from the analytics company Santiment.
The so-called Bitcoin whales, or addresses containing at least 10,000 coins, have increased to 114, which is the highest number registered in 2020. With the current BTC price hovering around $18,500, those addresses have $185 million or more worth of the primary cryptocurrency.
Entities holding between 1,000 and 10,000 bitcoins have also expanded. Santiment concluded that they have hit a new all-time high of 2,449. The number of such addresses had dropped to 2,000 in April, shortly after the mid-March sell-offs.
Apart from addresses with massive bitcoin quantities, retail interest has been growing lately as well. Google trends data is typically a good indicator of such interest in the field, and it displays a substantial growth since early October.
As the graph above demonstrates, the “buy bitcoin” searches worldwide exploded to a one-year high last week. It even surpassed the craze that occurred around the third BTC halving in mid-May.
Nevertheless, the macro scale still shows room for growth. While the interest now has been undoubtedly rising, it’s still has a long way to go to catch up with the data from late 2017 and early 2018.
At the time, Bitcoin’s price was heading to its all-time high of nearly $20,000, and the retail interest spiked accordingly. Although BTC has neared that price level now, the Google Trends data shows that the masses haven’t even arrived yet.
