“Sharks” and “Whales” Buy the Bitcoin Dip

With bitcoin prices down 30% in the past two months, the on-chain data tells a nuanced story seen time and again in finance. Whales and sharks, the big players in crypto, are accumulating at a rapid pace:

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Bitcoin whales and even sharks are buying at a furious pace (Source: Glassnode)

The last 30 days have seen sharks (those with 100-1,000 BTC) and whales (1,000 BTC+) pick up over $23.3 billion in bitcoin.

If our Dollar 2.0 thesis is correct, it’s not actually easy to see why.

What’s seen: Congress passed laws to support stablecoin technology in time for America’s 250th anniversary next July.

What’s not seen: a 216-hour series of technical moves from November 22 to December 2, during which BlackRock, Vanguard, and Bank of America flipped switches that “captured” bitcoin into institutional-grade wrappers and distribution. JPMorgan followed up with a tokenized money market fund called MONEY on December 15.

The price action obliged with a late-November air pocket near $84,209; then the classic blood-in-the-streets script took over. Here’s how the rich get richer buying wholesale on the cheap… while retail sell, then buy headlines.

~ Addison

P.S. It’s quite a story. We’ll detail the “How Wall Street Ate Bitcoin in 216 Hours” in the December issue of the Grey Swan Monthly Bulletin, coming to your inbox soon for paid-up members.

Members can also catch us for 2026: Something Wicked This Way Comes this afternoon on Grey Swan Live! we’re joined by Dan Amoss — a forensic accountant by training and a market bloodhound by instinct. A short glance at the calendar reveals… this will be our last scheduled Grey Swan Live! in 2025.

To the casual observer, Dan’s work invites comparisons to Michael Burry of The Big Short fame. The difference is that Dan was practicing this brand of forensic investing long before Hollywood learned how to spell “CDO.” For the last decade, he’s been trading stocks and options for another friend you may recognize, Jim Rickards.

Dan’s going to walk us through several trades he’s made during the AI boom — and, more importantly, the accounting stress fractures beneath the surface that lead him to believe 2026 could prove even more treacherous for individual investors than 2000–01 or 2008–09.

It’ll be dense, unsettling, and refreshingly coherent. You won’t want to miss this one.

Bitcoin is off roughly 30% in two months, and the choir is back to singing funeral hymns. But down in the code and wiring—the on-chain ledgers where the market tells the truth—another story is printing. Glassnode shows the big wallets moving like tugboats at night: “sharks” holding 100–1,000 BTC and “whales” with 1,000+ have added about $23.3 billion in the last 30 days. If our Dollar 2.0 thesis holds, it’s not hard to see why; the operating system of finance keeps drifting on-chain while retail stares at the tape and the pros quietly mark up inventory.

What you can see: Congress laying the legal rail for stablecoins in time for America’s 250th next July. What you probably missed: a 216-hour series of technical moves from November 22 to December 2—BlackRock, Vanguard, and Bank of America flipping switches that “captured” bitcoin into institutional-grade wrappers and distribution. The price action obliged with a late-November air pocket near $84,209; then the classic blood-in-the-streets script took over. For better or worse, these digital assets are trading as a class, and as blockchain becomes the default wiring in global finance, patient capital is buying the future wholesale while everyone else argues about the headline.

Turn Your Images On

If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.

Turn Your Images On

Bitcoin whales and even sharks are buying at a furious pace (Source: Glassnode)

The last 30 days have seen sharks (those with 100-1,000 BTC) and whales (1,000 BTC+) pick up over $23.3 billion in bitcoin.

If our Dollar 2.0 thesis is correct, it’s not actually easy to see why.

What’s seen: Congress passed laws to support stablecoin technology in time for America’s 250th anniversary next July.

~ Addison

It’ll be dense, unsettling, and refreshingly coherent. You won’t want to miss this one.

Turn Your Images On

If you have requests for new guests you’d like to see join us for Grey Swan Live!, or have any questions for our guests, send them here.

In a healthy economy, production and consumption communicate constantly. If a company builds something useful, customers respond by buying it. If they overbuild, inventories pile up and prices fall, sending a signal to slow down.

AI infrastructure, by contrast, is being built largely on faith. Companies are scaling up compute power without clear signs of sustainable demand. Unlike oil and gas, where prices adjust second-by-second, AI companies operate in a fog. They release tools, collect usage stats, and hope that paid conversions will follow.

But hope is not a business model.

Six months ago — before the GENIUS Act was signed and before Washington put a nameplate on what had already begun — we were describing a slow rewiring of money.

For better or worse, we called it Dollar 2.0: the quiet migration of finance from paper promises and batch settlement to tokens, smart contracts, and ledgers that never sleep.

The name Dollar 2.0 is derived from the way Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has been touting the stablecoin environment’s promise to create a larger global market for U.S. dollars and Treasurys.

The dollar-centric system and its bubbles may have given the U.S. economy a form of Dutch disease. This system has many rarely debated costs that go along with its benefits.

Deficit spending and stimulus inflated prices for stocks, real estate, and consumer goods. Trillions in savings remain in accounts from stimulus bills.

Without this spending, prices would be lower, a point lost on the Biden administration’s hyper-Keynesian economists, who never met a spending bill they did not cheer.

As we round out this year, what’s being repriced is more than the market task of assessing risk. Legitimacy. That’s what is under scrutiny right now.

Seen through a cyclical lens, that makes sense. The Fourth Turning, popularized by Howe and Strauss, is upon us. So are Dalio’s long and short debt cycles.

We watch the Fed meetings, minutes and press conferences with the same intrigue as always. But long cycle is telling us the short-term one doesn’t have the gumption that the markets once believed.

It’s actually amusing, if you think about it. We spend a lot of our lives believing there’s a narrative that ties this ol’ ball spinning free in space together in some coherent pattern.