Ethereum whales have registered a sharp uptick in activity in the past few days, making nearly 2,600 transactions worth over $1 million each yesterday alone. This is the highest number of such transaction activities in a day since January.
The company noted that this surge in activity occurred amid the market-wide retracement that sent shockwaves throughout the crypto space. Ethereum, for its part, stood at $3,000 until May 5 before suddenly dropping $300 within minutes. The situation only got worse in the following days and ETH found itself struggling to stay above $2,000.
This psychological support line finally gave in yesterday and ether dumped to $1,700. This became its lowest price since last April. However, ETH reacted well to this drop and now trades around $2,100.
Recent behavior of Ethereum whales
According to Santiment, an Ethereum investor is considered a whale after reaching $1 million or more.
“For many assets, these would be addresses with $100k or more. For Bitcoin and Ethereum, due to the incomparable market cap levels, whales are typically more defined as anywhere between $1M or more, to $10M or more (depending on current price levels).” – the firm explained last month.
On May 2, Santiment reported that deep-pocketed Ethereum investors had begun aggressively accumulating ETH after four months of inactivity. The market intelligence firm said entities holding between 1,000 and 10,000 ETH suddenly added a total of 142,000 ETH, worth around $407,415,040 at the time.
Fundamental Aspects
The Ethereum ecosystem is preparing for its largest event, dubbed The Merge, which will see the blockchain adopting a proof-of-stake consensus algorithm instead of the recently criticized proof-of-work.
This transition was seen as a very bullish move, with a significant number of high-profile and institutional investors keen to get on board.
According to Ethereum.org, the total number of ETH staked is over 12,500,000 units by almost 400,000 validators as of today. Additionally, the ecosystem continues with its burning program that has a significant impact on the market price. More than 2.3 million ETH have already been eradicated from existence.
