Quite an interesting situation. I constantly monitor various on-chain metrics and analytics from major data providers. They have been reporting for months that the circulating supply is declining and that there are fewer and fewer bitcoins on the exchanges. Recently, Glassnote published fresh data that clearly shows that the bitcoin's exchange balance has fallen to record lows in the last 3 years.
I would take the data coming from Glassnode with a ton of salt, they have a long history of really screwing statistics up simply because they want to show you something that they have uncovered, like that time I will never forget where they claimed the Paypal news was the reason for an increase in volume when if you zoom out it was just the usual Sunday-Monday difference at that time.
Second, it might be possible that some exchanges have moved a lot of coins from their addresses to new and smaller more manageable cold storage wallets, for example, Coinbase had, according to some pretty reliable news exceeded 1 million coins in storage, yet there was no label anywhere on those addresses, nobody knew them, not glassnode not chainanalysis.
But this does not affect the price. She doesn't seem to be affected by any news at all. Reductions in the circulating supply, the adoption of bitcoin in the Swiss city of Lugano also went unnoticed by the market. Also, the tweets of Elon Musk and Michael Saylor that they are not going to sell bitcoin and that now is the time to invest have no effect either.
This indeed is a bit weird, I honestly thought that the Lugano news would fuel up the price a bit more, we were on a trend to erase losses from that crash, there were positive bits here and there that should have succeeded in moving the market. Looking back, the fake amazon news, even with the consequent retracement did push the price higher than all these combined.
I think we're in for a long period of nothing when something really major must happen! But since I'm also more wrong than right on prediction one can get ready for a rollercoaster too.
The global inflation and the war in Ukraine created some kind of uncertainty and many traders are still afraid to take risks.
I think we're looking at the wrong indicator by looking at volume and traders, traders are not long terms holders, they make their profits and they dump it, looking for something else, a better indicator would be the amount of $ flowing into changes, but that's one thing we will never know unless some major one gets hacked.
It might be that the lack of coins on exchanges is actually balancing a low demand too.
Or that simple some traders who were doing arbitrage or scalping are simply giving up and moving to more volatile markets.