There are also some high-volume sales that are done off the exchanges, mainly by big investors who don't want to disturb the market and buy directly from early

There are also some high-volume sales that are done off the exchanges, mainly by big investors who don't want to disturb the market and buy directly from early adopters. One company that does that is http://epiphyte.us http://epiphyte.us (which I happened to speak with today, but I'm not affiliated with them): We provide customers who are looking to enter the digital asset space with deep, off-market pools of liquidity. Through these liquidity pools, we operate as broker/dealers for large blocks of digital assets. Edit: Also, a thread on Reddit about what appears to be a big off-exchange sale of 117,000 BTC that was supposedly related to Fortress's Bitcoin fund: http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1u4fc6/record_number_of_bitcoin_days_destroyed_and_10/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1u4fc6/record_numbe...