There's a lot happing right now in the back door of large-scale crypto transactions. The growing number of institutional investors are allocating funds in crypto assets, while one of Wall Street's most prominent advisors stresses out the importance of learning about the industry.
While the past periods of crypto market development have seen high-net-worth individuals retaining the summit of whale-buyers, now, hedge funds are coming into play, as can be monitored and confirmed by looking at BTC explorer's >$100k transactions frequency. This tendency is also reported by Bobby Cho from Cumberland, a cryptocurrency trading branch of DRW Holdings LLC, the one that handles a lot of OTC trades between institutional bodies and the largest miners.
Interestingly, the miners themselves now tend to go for scheduled OTC trades instead of offloading the mined coins during the surges. According to Mr. Cho, OTC trading has increased from $250 mln to around $30 bln of trade volume per day, which is currently lower than the daily volume of all cryptoexchanges in the world combined. One of the main reasons behind this is lowered volatility, which makes the market itself more attractive to institutional investors. The second part, of course, is the emerging body of proper regulation.
You would also be amazed to know that miners sometimes manage to put some premium on the coins sold thanks to those coins being 'clean' - for institutional investors it's easy to prove that the coins they hold have never been involved in money laundering or other criminal schemes.