Bitcoin whales accumulate $16.7B while ETF outflows hit record highs in the same week
A Digital Asset News solo presentation analyzing the divergence between whale accumulation and record ETF outflows in Bitcoin markets during late June and early July 2025.
Summary
The host of Digital Asset News breaks down a striking market divergence: large Bitcoin holders purchased over 270,000 BTC — worth approximately $16.7 billion — over two weeks, while spot Bitcoin ETFs recorded their worst month of outflows since launch, shedding $4 billion in June 2025. The host frames this as a classic pattern of informed large holders accumulating while retail investors exit during a downturn. He also covers on-chain signals including dormant wallet movements potentially linked to Tim Draper, the Ondo Finance tokenized securities announcement, and a live demonstration of an offline AI app called Edge Gallery. The episode closes with a Q&A session covering topics ranging from the GENIUS Act, Solana, Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), and the four-year Bitcoin cycle.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Whale Accumulation vs. ETF Outflows
Host: Looks like whales are doing whale things, and it's a tale as old as time. Whales are insiders who keep buying as retail keeps selling. Today we're essentially taking a look at what's going on there, and it's not surprising, especially as we move forward. For this one, I am not shocked.
Bitcoin whales bought $16.7 billion of Bitcoin in two weeks, even as ETFs bleed a record $4 billion. Now, this is the great thing about being in a bear market, because the people that are here — all of you, Gaspie, fees, blink, frosty peas, everybody else — you know how this all works. Bear markets are the same things. And it's just interesting to see the thesis get validated in the background, as there are people that still believe in it even though the mass outflow continues to happen.
So, Bitcoin — $16.7 billion in two weeks. ETFs bleed $4 billion. And of course, a lot of people will just focus on the ETF bleed, which we'll take a look at, but not too bad.
Large Bitcoin holders bought more than 270,000 Bitcoin over the past two weeks as US institutions pulled money out at a record pace. Not surprising. ETFs shed $4 billion in June — their worst month since listing. Let me read that again: $4 billion out in June, which is their worst month since listing.
Now, in January 2024, somewhere around there — correct me in the comments section — when we got the spot ETF that actually rolled out, there was a lot of talk about how it might do pretty well, and it did great. Obviously, for a couple of years or so. But unfortunately, there's a whole host of people that are buying now. There is retail, there are advisers buying it. Even BlackRock's buying a little bit into that. And then also there are others like Arc Investments who are buying the ETF itself. Those I don't think are really selling off, but it is a usual case as retail gets out. And when they're down 40–50%, that's a red flag for them. Now, for us that's just a Tuesday, but for these guys they're going to keep selling. They're going to keep getting out. And this is why I still believe that we have more of a bottom to go.
I am actually quite happy with this price right here. I will continue to buy every single Monday, especially determined by what the risk levels are from Ben Cowen's site. But I got to tell you, so far it's working out not too bad.
Anyhow, to finish this up — outflows pushed the funds into the red for 2026 as a whole for the first time. And these products finally recorded $221 million inflow on Thursday, which would be just yesterday. And little news flash: BlackRock was actually selling. It was the other ones — Fidelity, Arc Investment, Valkyrie — who were finally doing the inflows, bringing the total up to a positive $223 million. And without that, we would have had roughly two to two-and-a-half weeks of just straight-up outflows. So people are continuing to sell. We'll see how it goes.
Whale Accumulation Patterns and On-Chain Data
Whales went the other way. Those are the ones that have been here for quite some time. They added more than 27,000 Bitcoin, while the spot premium — which is a gauge of how hard US buyers are bidding — stayed negative, meaning the buying was not coming from spot desks.
So if we take a look at that and just kind of overlay it with the addresses holding over 100 Bitcoin — now, in 2013–2014, having over 100 Bitcoin meant you could maybe pay the rent for a one-bedroom apartment, not in LA, but somewhere else. Now, 100 Bitcoin is roughly $6.7 million. That is a lot of money to be holding on to. And you can just see that since roughly 2024, there's just been accumulation — whales just buying and buying and buying.
Now, of course, we get up to the October 2025 level and those whales did what they do. They dumped and sold a little bit, because they've got to take some chips off the table. These are the people that are the smart ones. They realize that it doesn't go up forever. You want to pull some profits off and then reinvest at some point when we start to crash. And this is what they've been waiting for. It's what they always do. I see no problem with this whatsoever. Actually, hats off to the whales for doing what they were supposed to do, which is take profits along the way — because nobody went broke taking profits.
Whale Shadows and Dormant Wallet Movements
But as that happens, there are these things called whale shadows. This is from Bitcoin Magazine Pro — I think there's a link in the description, you can check this out. What these are is an indicator which shows when Bitcoin has not moved on-chain for many years and when it finally moves again. So essentially, it's like people would say these are old shadows of whales that have gone around, and as they move their Bitcoin, that creates a shadow — the coins are moving from a wallet where they've stayed for years to another wallet.
I'm just going to give you a little breakdown here. This doesn't mean that they're selling. However, if you had Bitcoin in your wallet for seven, nine years, there's really no other reason to move it. It's not like you're going to say, "Oh, I've got $7 million worth of Bitcoin, let me move it around so I can pay for this coffee." No. Usually what happens is they move it around so they can sell it. Again, nothing wrong with that.
And we can see there's a huge spike here. Coincidentally, this was roughly one year ago. Look at that — July 4th, 2025. Today is July 3rd, 2025. So we'll see if things line up. But I will say that there was quite a spike just yesterday, Thursday, July 2nd. Looks like we had 5,284 wallets that moved things around.
Tim Draper's Possible Coinbase Prime Deposit
What happened? Well, maybe part of that is Tim Draper. This is from Look On Chain — definitely a follow, they've got some pretty good information. A wallet possibly linked to Tim Draper deposited 1,000 Bitcoin to Coinbase Prime seven hours ago.
Now, Tim could just be moving things around because he's bored and he wants to move 1,000 Bitcoin around for the giggles. Or maybe Tim is going to sell, like all the other smart people. So, as a reminder, he bought 29,656 Bitcoin from seized Silk Road assets during the US Marshals Service auction in 2014. The purchase price — check this out — $632 per Bitcoin. Again, that was back in 2014, totaling $18.7 million. Those roughly 30,000 Bitcoin at the peak of October 2025 were worth $3.74 billion and are now worth $1.82 billion. I don't think Tim would really worry too much if he's like, "Well, I've only got two billion." I think he'll be okay.
So again, as a reminder: if anybody tells you to diamond hands and that you should never sell, tell them to mind their own business and you do what you've got to do. And that's why I have the rules, which is take profits.
Anyhow, let me know what you think about that in the comments section. It just goes to show you that whales and retail are a little bit different. Not you guys — I think you've got a pretty good head on your shoulders. But maybe some retail are all believing in the four-year cycles. Maybe Tim is believing in the four-year cycles and says, "Hey, maybe I should sell off some and take some profits from the days of 2014 before we go into a bigger crash."
Four-Year Cycle Analysis and Price Projections
Now, as a reminder, not everything is repeatable, but it's been playing out pretty well. If you just take a look at the all-time high to the all-time lows in the last three cycles, it was between 365 and 411 days — roughly a year or a year and a couple of months. Our last top was October 6th. I think we're going to bottom out in October or November of 2026. And during that time, the drawdown might be around 77%, because before it was 86–87%, which is quite a bit. If we follow in line with that, that means a price of $37,800. I don't know if we can go that low. Anything's possible.
But I will tell you, as far as diminishing returns — we're not going to be able to buy Bitcoin at whatever Tim bought it for, $632. There are diminishing returns on the return on investment, but I think there's also another factor that not too many people talk about, which is the diminishing returns on the downfall.
Right now, going back four years — on July 3rd, 2022, during that awful bear market when Voyager, Celsius, Luna, FTX, all that stuff collapsed — we were down 71%. We only went down six more percent in November. So during that time, that was actually a pretty good time to accumulate. People would say, "Well, I'm going to buy the absolute bottom." Good luck. You can do whatever you want to do. It's not financial advice.
Now we're at 51% down. We're not hitting 60%. We're not even close to 71%. If we want to do 71% down from the all-time highs, that wouldn't be $61,000 — it would be $37,319. That's where we should be if we lined up with last time. I think we're doing just fine right now. I think things are going pretty good.
Cold Storage Reminder
But as a quick reminder before we go on and talk about the ETF stuff — these whales that you see, the reason why they're whales is they're smart enough to realize that they can't keep this in some kind of hot wallet. As a reminder, I just got an email today. Somebody had lost not their entire life savings, but a big chunk. And they asked me what they could do about it. And I was like, not much. You can try to get a hold of Zach XBT, but that's gone, my man.
I just want to remind everybody: if you've got it in hot wallets, put it in some cold wallets. Put it in a Ledger, put it in a Tangem. I don't really use Ledger too much anymore — not because it's bad, I just don't like the clunky interface and I like Tangem better. Also, just so you know, 50% or so I trust in custodial storage, and that's the same one that Larry Fink and Michael Saylor are using as far as Coinbase Prime. So give that a whirl before things go sideways and hackers get you.
Bitcoin ETF Flow Breakdown
And then lastly on this topic — Bitcoin ETF flow. This is the difference between what some might call smart money, which I just think of as big money, and retail. You can see that BlackRock had nothing but roughly 12 days of outflows. But good news — Fidelity, Arc Investment, Valkyrie, and others brought the total up to a positive $223 million. And without that, we would have had roughly two to two-and-a-half weeks of straight-up outflows. So people are continuing to sell. We'll see how it goes.
And as a reminder, Bitcoin over the last year or so has been down, but as we go down, this is the time to accumulate.
Ondo Finance and Tokenized Securities
And then lastly — we talk a lot about Bitcoin, but we really should sometimes focus a little bit on some of the other stuff that's out there. Ondo just debuted an SEC-aligned tokenized stock model with a BlackRock ETF and Micron shares. Ondo itself — I don't own any of that, but people say that I should maybe at some point. As a reminder, since it launched in 2024, it's still in the positive. Not too bad for what it is. But over about a year or so, it's looking pretty awful — I think it's down around 57%. So a little bit worse than Bitcoin.
What does it say here? The company said Thursday that the tokenized securities are issued on Ethereum through Oasis Proto and an SEC-registered transfer agent that Ondo acquired last year. So it looks like Ondo is kind of the overseer and Ethereum is the underlying layer, and it looks like they're going to be SEC-compliant for stocks. This allows token holders to receive the same governance rights as investors who own the securities through traditional brokerage accounts — Fidelity, stuff like that.
Importantly, just so you know, the product is not yet available to US investors. We've got to keep waiting because the wheels of government move quite slowly. Ondo said it is the first production deployment of the SEC's custodial tokenization model, using two securities to demonstrate that blockchain-based securities can fit within the current US regulatory and custody framework. So watch out for Ondo. It might be a big sleeper and we'll see if it goes up.
Q&A Session
Host: Now let's go into a little Q&A and answer your questions — this is the best part of the show.
Bodan asks about Canton. Canton's still pretty good as far as real-world assets and stuff, so not too bad. I do have some Canton.
Gas Fees says: "Yes, a wick down to around $38,000 would mark a complete capitulation — up for the next three years from there." I'll take it.
Sana and Hype are doing pretty good. And thank you, Smiley — I forgot to mention one big thing about this article. There was some article that talked about how Solana was keeping afloat and doing quite well. How is Solana doing actually, after being announced as one of the partners for that OpenUSD stablecoin? Let's take a peek. It is up 0.9%, but SOL is down 46% in a year. You think that's awful? Bitcoin's down 51%. So, just saying. $81. Not too well. But in 12 days it's up 13% roughly, in two weeks it's up 19%, and 30 days up 12%. Not too bad.
I don't check my portfolio anymore. I pretty much got it stocked away over at iTrust, so I don't really take a look at it too much. Good for me, good for us.
Alchemist Silvery says: "Shut up, Michael Saylor." Yeah, Michael Saylor's getting piled on these days. I feel bad for him, but he kind of brought it on himself with the "don't sell your Bitcoin" messaging. Everything comes back to you, right? I don't really have a problem too much with it because I never really got into MicroStrategy or Strategy. I do own some Strategy just to see what it was all about and the hype, because I talk about it so I might as well own it. But I don't really feel it.
As a reminder, last cycle in 2022 during the bear market, Strategy dropped 85–86%. And then from there, they rallied all the way up. So it was the people who took a real hard dive into it. I believe in that — they bought it and it went up. If Saylor and Strategy can make it through this bear market, which I don't see why they wouldn't, I think it'd be okay. Now, people would talk about it being a Ponzi and so on and so forth. We'll see. I'm not going to get into it. I already learned my lesson with Celsius and stuff like that. I don't understand some things, so I'm just going to stay away. Like Warren Buffett says: only invest in things that you understand.
Offline AI Demo — Edge Gallery
Which, speaking of which — yesterday I was talking about private LLMs, private large language models. This was on NFA Live and Guy was talking about how it's important to have a private, like a private ChatGPT, so that companies like OpenAI with ChatGPT and Anthropic with Claude don't have all your data and all your information. I think if you're in crypto, this would probably be a big thing for you.
So yesterday I made a mistake. I was showing you how you could do a private LLM, private AI, and there's an app called Edge Gallery from Google. What I did yesterday was show you how it worked, but when I did this, I didn't turn on airplane mode. I just turned off the Wi-Fi, but my phone was still getting service.
So now I want to show you this properly. Now I'm on airplane mode. Usually you need an internet connection to connect to a large language model like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Grok, or whatever else. But with this app, with Edge Gallery, you don't need anything because it's already downloaded. Just know it's 2.5 gigabytes — it's kind of big. So if you want to try it, it's pretty good.
Watch this. Let's see — how can I minimize my taxes? And there you go. It'll go through this and do whatever else. And if you want to do something like this where it can give you information without having everything uploaded to a server, there's your option.
I want to do one more thing. What are some signs to look for if somebody's trying to overthrow the government? And just for the record, if the Department of Homeland Security is watching this video — which could be — I have no ambition to do that. Just for fun. Now it's really got to think, and that's one of the downfalls with that. Sometimes it's just very slow.
How about this — ask for an image. Let's try it. So you know when you're doing things and you have questions about what something does — like how do I put these two wires together, how does this work? Watch this. What kind of dog is this? It pretty much just says light-colored coat, tan markings, blah blah blah, the dog looks relaxed. Husky mix. Well, thanks.
So that was a little branch off into how AI works and how you can make it easy on yourself. And then lastly — we have a second channel called Dane. If you want to see how to use AI for simple things, like right now I'm going through an audit and have to find all my receipts. It's a lot easier for Claude to find them than anybody else. I also work for a nonprofit and it's a lot easier to have Claude find all the grant proposals and have Claude fill them out than anything else. So check out that video if you're interested.
GENIUS Act and Stablecoin Legislation
Host: And this is why I didn't talk about the GENIUS Act over the last three or four months. I mentioned it in passing. I just didn't think it was going to go through. So far, maybe they have a last-minute thing today where they're like, "Hey, let's get this passed," and 60% of senators and Congress are like, "Yeah, let's go for it." Democrats come over and vote for it. Everybody's happy. Maybe that happens today. In the next three hours, anything's possible. If not, poor Cynthia Lumis. She did such a great job — Senator out of Wyoming — it just didn't happen.
Free Money, Cycles, and Viewer Questions
Geek Dice is right. If you want some free money, just get elected. Be a local congressman or congresswoman. Then get on some type of advisory boards, hopefully the banking committee, and then just get insider information and start trading. Now, I'm not telling you what to do. I'm just telling you what those guys do, and those guys made a boatload of money.
Robert Downey says: "Hey, where can I get free money?" Well, you could open up an iTrust account — they give you a hundred bucks just to open it up, which is pretty nice. And as far as free money goes, if you have patience, this is the best way to make it essentially. Think about that. Every single cycle, we've bottomed out in this fourth year. We had a halving in 2024, in 2025 we get an all-time high, 2026 we have a crash, 2027 we have a rebuild year, then 2028 we have another halving. So if you want to make some free money, per se — and not to say this could absolutely happen, but it has happened since 2009 — this would probably be the opportunity. I would stay away from memecoins because the only ones that win on those are the insiders.
And even if you don't like crypto — although I think you picked the wrong channel to come to — even if you don't like crypto, the S&P 500 is pretty stable as far as year-over-year gains. I think it averages out to like 10%. Some years are pretty good, some years are not so good.
Iman says: "If these gaming companies were smart, they'd use Bitcoin to help lower the cost of consoles." Yeah, that'd be great.
Rob asks: Grand Theft Auto 6 comes out soon. Do you think crypto could be utilized in the game? I sure hope so, because that will make everybody lose their minds. And then of course there's speculation and people buy crypto and off it goes. How long has it taken for Grand Theft Auto 6 to come out? I was playing that when I was younger. That was a long, long time ago.
As far as the Gasp comment about free money — if you want some free money, just get elected. You have a salary of $200,000 yet you have $400 million in the bank. That worked out fantastically for, say, Bernie Sanders — although he doesn't have $400 million, but he does have a nice second home. I don't even know if he's ever had a job. Sorry, Bernie Sanders fans.