Andrew Tate recently posted on social platforms, questioning MicroStrategy’s purchase of about 10,000 Bitcoins but failing to drive the price up, a statement that quickly sparked heated discussions in the Bitcoin community. Despite the staggering size of this nearly $1 billion purchase, the Bitcoin price remained in the $88,000 to $92,000 range before and after the announcement, with little market reaction.
The discussion focused on a key question: Why didn’t such a huge buying order drive spot prices? Industry insiders pointed out that the core reason is that micro strategies usually do not execute buy orders through the open market, but rely on over-the-counter (OTC) to complete large orders. OTC platforms privately match buyers and sellers to complete huge transactions off-chain, avoiding impact on the order book and leaving no traces on the price chart.
In other words, such institutional buying does not immediately affect the market price. Only when OTC liquidity cannot meet demand is that institutions are forced to enter the open market, triggering price movements. The current market depth of Bitcoin is enough to digest hundreds of millions of dollars in transactions without affecting the price, which also explains the ability of microstrategies to complete the increase “quietly”.
The analyst added that while 10,000 Bitcoins sound huge, they actually represent only about 0.05% of the circulating supply and still represent a fraction of the active supply. Institutions complete the purchase through negotiation channels, making its immediate impact on the price closer to zero.
However, some critics argue that microstrategies rely more on emotional influence than on direct price impact. They believe that the official announcement may be aimed at creating a bullish atmosphere rather than actually driving the price of Bitcoin. With the recent Bitcoin market breaking out of the range, more people are aware that the factors driving the market upward include whale holdings, short liquidation, and macro policy expectations, rather than the buying behavior of a single institution.
This discussion highlights a key conclusion: the immediate fluctuations in Bitcoin prices reflect more of the flow of orders in the open market than the initial buying behavior of institutions. For retail investors, understanding Bitcoin’s OTC market mechanism and overall liquidity structure is far more important than blindly expecting “institutional buying = price surge”.
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