The crypto market has had quite a rough ride of late. The king altcoin Ethereum in the last 24 hours tanked by 3.54%. It followed BTC’s movement closely as ETH’s correlation to the king coin stood at 0.91.
The past 24 hours have been pivotal for Ethereum as the bears gained momentum. On May 20, Ethereum network volume also dropped drastically over the past day by 19.5%. These are undoubtedly worrying signals for the Ethereum ecosystem and the crypto community in general.
What about the charts?
With the fall in prices and increasing fear in the financial markets, transaction volume took a big hit across Ethereum.
Median trading volume fell to a 16-month low of $107.7 as Glassnode reported. This was discouraging to the ecosystem as it kind of signaled that whale activity had stagnated.
And, of course, whale activity is often seen as an important indicator of the overall sentiment of a crypto asset. The previous such low was observed on 20 May.
Another worrying metric suggested a bearish trend across many Ethereum-based addresses. The number of lost addresses on Ethereum hit a 2-year high of 33.4 million on May 21.
With many addresses in loss, it wouldn’t be unsurprising to see investors exit their positions.
Buterin accumulates more news
While Ethereum dominated social media discussions due to the upcoming “merger”, Vitalik Buterin also took center stage. Recently, in one of his Tweets, he commented, “I’m not a billionaire anymore. This serves as a shocking reality check for the Ethereum community due to Buterin’s digital wallet holdings.
As recent as November 2021, his digital wallet contained holdings worth about $1.5 billion. Since then, the price of the Ether token that’s associated with the blockchain has fallen by 55%, as Bloomberg reported. In November 2021, Ether was worth around $4800 which has since collapsed below $2000. The sell-off during this time frame can be blamed on the macro headwinds along with regulatory standoffs.
Even so, to be victorious, the Ethereum community will have to weather the current bearish period with recessionary warnings filtered on all fronts.
