The Bitcoin market structure is believed to have undergone a massive shift since the significant price downturn seen on October 10, 2025. While the premier cryptocurrency has been on something resembling a recovery path since the market bloodbath, some sectors believe that the bear season has already kicked off.
With BTC sitting beneath its opening price of 2025, it is becoming increasingly difficult to make a bullish case for the world’s largest cryptocurrency. Moreover, an interesting data point about a relevant class of Bitcoin investors has emerged, further adding credence to the beginning of a possible bear market.
Are Bitcoin Treasury Firms Offloading Their Coins?
In a new post on X, CryptoQuant’s Head of Research, Julio Moreno, shared an on-chain insight to support the hypothesis that the Bitcoin bear market has started. This conclusion is based on the Balance Growth of an investor group known as the “dolphins.”
Dolphins refer to a group of crypto investors holding substantial amounts of a coin, placing them between small investors (shrimps) and the largest investors (whales). Specifically, Moreno described dolphins as wallet addresses with significant BTC holdings between 100 – 1,000 coins.
According to the latest data from CryptoQuant, the growth in the Dolphins’ BTC holdings has slowed down in the past year and appears to be in a downward trend. Moreno believes that this negative change points to the emergence of a Bitcoin bear market.
Moreno revealed that these Dolphin addresses had increased year-over-year by roughly 965,000 BTC when the BTC price hit its current all-time high around $125,000. Now that the BTC price is nearly 30% below its record high, the Bitcoin Dolphins’ balance stands at around 694,000 coins.
Moreno wrote on X:
This address cohort includes ETFs and Treasury companies, which have also stopped buying.
More interestingly, the CryptoQuant Head of Research revealed that this investor group consists of ETF issuers and Treasury companies, which have stopped purchasing Bitcoin. According to data from SoSoValue, the US-based Bitcoin exchange-traded funds have posted net outflows in five out of the last six weeks.
Meanwhile, BTC and crypto treasury companies have struggled in the past few months, with retail investors losing tens of billions to the hype. While there have been rarely reports of crypto treasury sell-offs, this decline in these Dolphins’ holdings tells an entirely different story.
Bitcoin Price At A Glance
As of this writing, the price of BTC stands at around $89,151, reflecting an over 3% decline in the past 24 hours.
