Follow the wallets, not the talking heads. This weekend the bitcoin tape ran up to just shy of $86,950, came within about $500 of its late-September high near $87,400, and then slipped back under $86,000. Second stall in a week. While the chart crowd argued about the line, the real whales filed their receipts Monday morning. The receipts say something interesting.
Start with the biggest corporate whale in the water. Strategy’s 8-K says it bought 334 BTC from Oct. 1 through Oct. 4, for $28.7 million, at an average of about $85,839. That takes it to 848,000 BTC. Same filing: Strategy spent $73.7 million over those same days buying back its STRC preferred stock, and $176.3 million on STRC buybacks counting Sept. 28 to 30. The buying streak is alive. The cash just went to two places, coin and capital stack, and the coin got the smaller slice this week.
Now the smaller whale. Strive CEO Matt Cole posted that Strive bought 2,000 BTC for $169 million, at an average cost of $84,422, taking it to 29,462 BTC. He said 61.5% of the money came from SATA, its preferred stock, and warrants brought in $56.7 million. Read that again: a company holding about 3.5% as much bitcoin as Strategy bought roughly six times as many coins this week. The little fish is swimming hard, and it is doing it in the open with a filing behind it.
Then the ghosts. On-chain tracker Lookonchain flagged two early holders who bought 1,346 BTC about 13 years ago, at an average near $178, and just moved a tiny test amount, 0.0005 BTC, worth about $43. Their stack is worth about $115 million now. Labeled speculation: a $43 test is what you send when you want to be sure the keys still work before you move real size. It could also be an estate, a lawyer or simple curiosity. A test is not a sale. But when 13-year-old coins clear their throat near a multi-month high, the smart move is to watch, not to guess.
Over in XRP, the big wallets are doing nothing at all, and that is the tell. Analyst Ali Martinez wrote Sunday that XRP whales have “remained relatively sidelined over the past week, with no significant change” in holdings, while the price coils near $1.50. The calendar is loaded: Evernorth says it expects to close its Armada deal on Oct. 7, with XRPN trading on Nasdaq on Oct. 8, subject to remaining closing conditions. Labeled speculation: big holders sitting flat into a dated event usually means they want to see the first prints before they commit. Quiet hands are not empty hands.
The populist read here is simple. The man on the street is told the Fed, the jobs report and the chart pattern decide everything. Meanwhile, the people with real size are telling you exactly what they did, in 8-Ks and signed posts, every Monday. Weekend liquidations, per CoinDesk, were light at $62.7 million, and shorts made up 68% of them. That is not a crowd in panic. That is a crowd leaning the wrong way and paying a small bill for it.
My positioning question for the week is not “will bitcoin break $87,000.” It is: who is buying at $84,000 to $86,000, with what money, and who is just testing their keys? This week the answer came with names and numbers attached. Watch the filings. They do not tweet in all caps.
Sources: Strategy 8-K; Matt Cole on X; Bloomingbit; Lookonchain; Tron Weekly; PR Newswire; CoinDesk; CoinDesk