In what has been a seemingly endless bull market for Bitcoin, the original digital asset’s price has risen almost 600% in the space of three years. Now (3 September) standing at $112,036, up from a local low of $16,450 in November 2022, BTC has surprised skeptics once again to gain a solid foothold above $100,000, which just a year ago would have been considered a pipe dream. It hasn’t been all plain sailing, though, as the recent correction down from an even more impressive record high of $123,153.22 set in July shows.
As one might expect, this near-ten-percent drop has got bears’ tongues wagging once again, with further speculation arising following the release of data from Glassnode showing a level of selling by whales unseen since 2018. And yet, the hype around the launch of Bitcoin Hyper, whose presales have already exceeded $13 million, demonstrate that long-term interest in the Bitcoin ecosystem is alive and well. We will look at the main factors that will affect the Bitcoin price this year and beyond as we seek to predict where the market could be headed in the short to medium term.
Short of a sell-off
As the data from Glassnode does indeed suggest, whales have been selling coins at a rate unseen in over seven years. It’s true that average balances for wallets with between 100 and 10,000 BTC have declined to 488 BTC per wallet, but this is hardly surprising given the huge gains made over the past year (during which BTC has more than doubled). Profit realisation is a natural part of the growth cycle, particularly when we’re talking about investment funds with quarterly and annual profit targets, which most whales are. Historically speaking, whale distribution has typically foreshadowed phases of consolidation, as profit-taking from major investors temporarily weighs on price momentum. Even with this enhanced selling, Bitcoin’s price has remained resilient in and around the $100,000–$110,000 range, which reveals strong underlying demand. What’s more, perhaps the largest whale of them all, Strategy (formerly known as MicroStrategy), has actually already begun buying the dip. CEO Michael Saylor confirmed that the treasury company acquired 6,048 Bitcoin for a total price of $449.3 million between 26 August and 1 September 1, 2025. Strategy’s holdings now stand at 636,505 BTC, with an average cost price of approximately $73,765. As other whales and even retail investors start to notice that a local bottom has been reached, a buying frenzy will likely ensue that will in turn push prices up to a new maximum. This has been the pattern in previous cycles: Whales trim exposure into strength, then smaller investors absorb the additional supply and BTC resumes its upward trend once profit-taking eases.
Prepare for Hyperdrive
The impending release of Bitcoin Hyper – a Layer-2 blockchain network developed on the Bitcoin platform that is aimed at speeding up transaction rates and further accommodating smart contracts while retaining the base layer’s security – has garnered a huge amount of interest from both retail and institutional investors. The associated HYPER token has already done over $13 million in pre-sales, with daily inflows ranging between $200–300,000. This winning combination of a canonical bridge offering 1:1 wrapped BTC transfers, ZK-rollups for quick and secure on-chain summarization of multiple off-chain transactions, and a Solana Virtual Machine (SVM) for ultra-fast transaction speeds promises to make Bitcoin Hyper a game-changer for the comparatively slow OG Bitcoin blockchain. The new technology will also enable strong smart contract and dApps functionality, which will help the Bitcoin blockchain to regain market share from more specialized projects like Ethereum and Chainlink. And it’s unlikely that the drive to create similar blockchain-enhancing projects will stop after Bitcoin Hyper – in fact quite the opposite is likely to occur. Consequently, as more and more new Layer-2 projects closely associated with Bitcoin’s brand and liquidity emerge, both these new proprietary tokens and of course the original BTC are poised to benefit. As such, some recent predictions of a $150–200,000 BTC price are not as pie in the sky as they might first appear.
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