The market has quietly changed hands.

In the past month, someone sold 400,000 bitcoins—valued at approximately $40 billion at current prices. Guess what? The price didn't crash. Not only did it not crash, but it also seemed like there was an invisible giant hand steadily supporting it from below.

The owners of this batch of goods are not ordinary players; they are all early investors, having held for more than half a year (known in the industry as "long-term holders"). Normally, with such a concentration of chips being sold off, the market should have been in chaos by now. But the reality is: someone is crazily buying up the stock, and they're doing it quickly and decisively.

**Retail investors? No longer the main characters.**

Chainalysis's data is quite startling - the proportion of retail investors in the entire trading market has dropped from 1.8% in 2021 to only 0.48% now. What does this mean? It has shrunk by three-quarters over four years.

Looking at the other side: the quarterly futures contracts that institutions love to play with have seen their open interest triple directly; meanwhile, the perpetual contracts that retail investors flock to have dropped from 68% to 29%. In the midst of this inflow and outflow, the rules of the game have already been rewritten.

**Spot ETFs have become a money-sucking black hole**

Where did the $40 billion sell-off go? The answer is those institutions in suits holding compliance licenses. A Bitcoin spot ETF is like a super vacuum cleaner, swallowing up all the chips dumped by long-term holders in one go.

This round of turnover is not a panic sell-off, but rather a meticulously orchestrated power transition. Early players chose to cash out for safety, while institutional capital entered the market in large quantities through compliant channels—the underlying logic of the market has switched from "retail investor faith" to "institutional allocation" mode.

Some people are exiting the market, while others are entering. This time, however, the ones taking over are no longer the next wave of retail investors, but rather those big players with massive funds who can influence the market's temperature.