Why Is Bitcoin Crawling This Cycle? Analyst Reveals the Hidden Factors

Bitcoin’s current upward movement feels unusually slow compared to past cycles. Experts attribute the current sluggishness in the market to the OG whales.

Willy Woo, for one, believes this cohort of early investors has slowed BTC’s growth, as the market struggles to absorb their massive profit-taking.

Bitcoin’s Sluggish Uptrend

In his latest post, prominent on-chain analyst Willy Woo explained that a significant portion of BTC supply is concentrated in the hands of early whales who accumulated heavily around 2011, when Bitcoin was trading at $10 or less.

These long-term holders are now sitting on massive unrealized gains, and whenever they sell, the market requires significant new capital inflows – over $110,000 for each BTC – to absorb their sales without driving prices down.

This creates resistance in price appreciation, as the market must constantly counterbalance the selling pressure from these original whales, making Bitcoin’s climb slower and more gradual in this cycle.

“This differential in cost basis, the supply they hold and their rate of selling has profound impacts on how much new capital that needs to come in to lift price. You can look at this as BTC going through growing pains until these 10,000x gain investors are absorbed.”

One major example of this whale activity comes from a Bitcoin OG now moving heavily into Ethereum. Lookonchain’s latest findings revealed a massive move by the whale who originally received 100,784 BTC seven years ago, worth $642 million then and over $11.4 billion on August 25th. In just the past five days, this early holder has been rapidly rotating out of Bitcoin into Ethereum.

They deposited around 22,769 BTC, which is around $2.59 billion, to Hyperliquid for sale, and used the proceeds to buy 472,920 ETH ($2.22 billion) on spot markets while simultaneously opening a 135,265 ETH long position worth $577 million.

The scale and speed of these transactions indicate aggressive profit-taking on BTC and a strong, highly leveraged bet on Ethereum’s upside.

Beyond these structural whale-driven headwinds, short-term volatility also plays a role in Bitcoin’s trajectory, especially during weekends.

Structural Weakness

Bitcoin’s sharp drop this weekend is not random but a result of structural weaknesses in the market. Weekends typically see thinner liquidity, as both spot and derivatives volumes decline, which leaves order books vulnerable to manipulation by large players, according to CryptoQuant.

On-chain data shows that BTC exchange reserves often rise before these weekend dips as sell pressure increases, while excessive long positioning in derivatives creates the conditions for liquidation cascades.

At the same time, metrics like SOPR reveal short-term holders taking profits, which further amplifies volatility. As such, these factors form what CryptoQuant calls a “liquidity trap,” where whales exploit weak market conditions to trigger stop-loss clusters and fuel sharp moves.