A massive cryptocurrency whale has moved nearly 25 trillion tokens of the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIB) off of a cryptocurrency trading platform’s wallet and into a wallet they control over six different transactions in a single day.
According to data from Ethereum blockchain explorer Etherscan, pointed out by analytics firm Santiment, the whale’s address now holds 24.94 trillion SHIB tokens, which amounts to about $276 million at the current price of $0.000011 per SHIB.
The whale’s address has also been rapidly accumulating Ethereum ($ETH) since early March, to now have 992 ETH (worth $1.7 million) alongside its meme token holdings.
The whale’s movement comes ahead of the highly anticipated launch of Shiba Inu’s layer-2 network Shibarium. The network, as CryptoGlobe reported, could launch as early as May 2023. Shibarium is designed to enable fast and cheap transactions for SHIB and other tokens in its ecosystem. It also burns SHIB with every transaction.
Shibarium’s native token is Bone ShibaSwap ($BONE), which is used to pay for gas fees and reward validators and delegators on the network. On March 11, 2023, Shiba Inu announced the launch of PUPPYNET, which is the early beta test of Shibarium. Anyone can access PUPPYNET through a new website and experiment with Shibarium’s features and functionalities.
The movements could indicate that the whale is bullish on the meme-inspired cryptocurrency. By moving the tokens from an exchange wallet to a self-custody wallet, the whale is reducing the supply of SHIB and ETH on the market, while securing itself against potential exchange-related risks.
Notably, SHIB has been facing selling pressure from bankrupt cryptocurrency lender Voyager Digital, which has sent trillions of tokens to the Nasdaq-listed cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase over the last few weeks.
Since February 14, Voyager has been sending assets to Coinbase regularly. Voyager has transferred 2.24 trillion SHIB, worth about $26 million, to Coinbase since that date, while still holding a large amount of assets.
Notably, most Shiba Inu investors have shown they aren’t planning on selling en masse, as the median time that users on Coinbase hold onto the meme-inspired cryptocurrency before either selling it or moving it to an external address has surpassed the 230-day mark.
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