Data from the Ethereum ($ETH) blockchain has shown that billionaire whale addresses, with at least 1 million $ETH in their balances, have accumulated a whopping 3.5 million coins over the past month, meaning their holdings moved up 14% in that period.
According to on-chain analytics Santiment, this means that since September 11, the 132 Ethereum addresses with over 1 million $ETH in their balances have added a total of $4.48 billion worth of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization into their wallets.
At the time of writing, market data shows that Ethereum is trading at $1,280 per token, after losing around 1.1% of its value over the last 24-hour period. Over the past 30 days, the cryptocurrency is down 5.2% amid a wider crypto market downturn.
In a separate tweet, Santiment also found that other Ethereum whale and shark addresses with smaller ETH balances have been divesting their holdings. Per the firm, Ethereum shark and whale addresses, holding between 100 and 1 million $ETH, have seen their balances drop by 3.3 million tokens in 5 weeks.
The sell-off occurred before $4.5 trillion asset manager Fidelity revealed it was going to offer Ethereum custody and trading to its institutional clients. The company’s announcement revealed investors would be able to buy, sell, and transfer Ethereum “using the same model provided for bitcoin investments today.”
The Ethereum network has steadily been growing over the last few months, surpassing 200 million unique addresses earlier this year even as transaction fees rose and processing times slowed as a result.
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