Since the price of Ethereum hit an all-time high of over $ 2,000 last month, the number of addresses with 10,000 or more ETH has barely changed, showing that whales are clinging to their funds despite the decline.
Data from on-chain analytics firm Santiment shows wallets valued at over 10,000 ETH, valued at over $ 18 million, are down 0.9% over the past four months at press time. The number is compared to a 7.2% decrease in the number of wallet holdings between 100 and 10,000 ETH.
The divergence could be related to the type of whale wallets on the blockchain. Some of these may be owned by organizations that provide services in the field, such as exchanges, who must hold the asset. Institutional investors can also be considered.
It is worth noting that part of Ethereum’s circulating supply has recently been included in various DeFi (decentralized finance) projects and in the Ethereum beacon chain. The Beacon Chain is a PoS (Proof-of-Stake) blockchain and signals the first step in the plan to change Ethereum’s consensus mechanism from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake. It runs along the original Ethereum PoW chain and ensures that the continuity of the chains is not broken.
According to the researcher, 3.5 million ETH are involved in the Beacon Chain with a value of over 6.3 billion US dollars. The blocked funds will be used by investors to become validators in the PoS network, generate a return on their ETH holdings and at the same time help secure the network.
The amount of Ethereum included in the decentralized finance (DeFi) area has also grown steadily. Data from DeFiPulse shows that 9.2 million ETH are now locked in the room, meaning a total of about 10% of the circulating supply of Ethereum is locked.
Around 3 million ETH are tied to Maker, while SushiSwap, Compound and Uniswap contain over 1 million ETH. According to CryptoCompare data, the price of ETH has hovered around the USD 1,800 mark in the past few days.
Selected image via Pixabay.
Comments are closed.