Apparently, miners recently decided to sell long-standing bitcoin assets earned from old reward blocks, just at the moment when the value of BTC rolled back from its historical peak this week.

Given the current limited liquidity in the market, such actions could seriously affect the bitcoin exchange rate.

A significant increase in the value of bitcoin over the past month, which reached its peak in the form of a new record, and then its collapse on Tuesday, provoked sales from the pioneers of mining. They began to realize their block rewards, thereby putting pressure on the cryptocurrency exchange rate.

Research conducted by CryptoQuant revealed that before bitcoin updated its maximum, reaching about $69,000, and then dropped to $62,000 during Tuesday, about 1,000 bitcoins worth about $69 million were moved to Coinbase from wallets that had not been used for more than a decade and, according to according to the researchers, they belong to miners. (The transfer of recently activated tokens to Coinbase, a major cryptocurrency exchange, may indicate their upcoming sale.)

"Given that the volume of offers on the exchange shows a liquidity of 5-10 bitcoins for every 100 dollars of exchange rate change, the sale of 1000 bitcoins is likely to lead to a sharp decrease in value," said Bradley Park, analyst at CryptoQuant, in an interview with CoinDesk. "This is especially true when traders are preparing to open short positions in response to the historical maximum reached by bitcoin, as it was on Tuesday."

Park added that the latest bitcoin arrivals on exchanges remind him of the surge in BTC inflation preceding the 40 percent drop in the exchange rate on March 12, 2020. This event took place against the background of the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, when governments around the world began to impose quarantine measures, forcing traders to seek refuge in flight due to instability.

After the completion of this massive sale, the value of bitcoin fell to $3,850.