A major cryptocurrency investor, believed to be the London-based Abraxas Capital Management, recently moved more than $206 million worth of Ethereum ($ETH) off the Bitfinex exchange over a 16-hour period.
Abraxas, a crypto-focused investment manager with over $2 billion in assets under management as of April 2024, reportedly deposited the ETH into Spark, a decentralized finance (DeFi) platform, to use the funds as collateral borrow DAI, a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar.
According to on-chain analysis firm Lookonchain, the firm borrowed 101 million DAI from the Spark protocol, and then swapped it for 101 million USDC that were deposited onto leading cryptocurrency exchange Binance.
traced further activity from the same address, indicating the borrowing of 101 million DAI from Spark. This DAI was then reportedly swapped for 101 million USDC, another stablecoin, and deposited onto the Binance exchange.
Spark offers a suite of DeFi products, including a money market protocol called SparkLend and a yield-bearing version of DAI called sDAI. It’s unclear what the whale will be using the USDC on Binance for.
The movement of such a large amount of ETH comes amid a period of modest growth for the cryptocurrency. Ethereum, the second-largest by market capitalization, is currently trading around $3,445, up nearly 3% in the past week but down around 9.5% in the past month. It remains significantly below its all-time high near $4,900, reached in November 2021.
Notably, Ethereum-focused investment products recently saw their largest outflows in nearly two years over the past week after investors moved $61 million off of these products.
As reported, however, data has shown that long-term BTC holders have started selling the holdings they accumulated throughout the bear market back in January, when spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) were listed in the United States. Long-term Ethereum holders, however, are still accumulating.
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