By Alicia Maher
Ethereum whale holders are making massive on-chain moves even though ETH price is struggling to maintain momentum. One of such moves by ETH whales happened a couple of days ago at about 20:12 UTC when an ETH whale moved about 100K ETH to an unidentified wallet.
ETH Price Is Still Falling
In another ETH-related transaction, another ETH whale moved more than 10K ETH to FTX crypto exchange’s wallet. It is worth noting that these transactions followed a severe ETH price dip which has been ongoing over the past seven days. While some ETH whales are transferring their ether coins, a few other ETH whales are increasing their ETH holdings.
The latest Santiment data noted that there had been a 2.3% increase in the amount of ETH owned by crypto wallet addresses with at least 1M ETH over the past six months. The Santiment analysis further remarked that these wallet addresses are responsible for nearly 22% of all ETH holdings globally. This past weekend ETH’s price dropped by another 10%. For a short time after the 10% price drop, the market cap of the second-largest crypto dipped below $290B – a first in nearly two weeks.
ETH 2.0 Is Months Away From Launch
One of eToro’s top market analysts, Simon Peters, commented that “ETH price was about $2.6K at the start of the week before it rose to about $3K before it returning to the $2.5K range as the week came to an end.” he further said, “ETH price is also responding to the current economic climate, especially the Russia-Ukraine which is not just affecting the crypto market but also the stock market. Hence, investors are reducing their crypto portfolio to invest in safe-haven assets.”
Peters also opined that investors’ uncertainty globally is the main cause of the current swings in the crypto market prices. “even though there might be changes in the demand for these crypto-assets, the crypto market remains global and is a reflection of these price fluctuations,” he concluded.
In other Ethereum-related news, Ethereum CEO, Vitalik Buterin, recently stated that PoS had been deployed successfully on testnets. Hence, they may launch ETH 2.0 sooner than later. A Beaconcha.in data revealed that ETH 2.0 deposit contracts have now exceeded 9.7m ETH (or about $25b). The report also revealed that there are now more than 306K ETH active validators.
A Drop In Revenue
Some crypto experts, including GlobalBlock analyst (Marcus Sotiriou), claimed that eth’s switch to a PoS network would impact ETH price positively. The network will become more scalable as miners would no longer need to validate ETH transactions.
The Possibility of a positive effect on ETH price after a switch to a PoS network will be good news for ETH holders, especially as the network’s revenue dropped massively to June 2021 range. Besides geopolitical issues, eth’s massive revenue decline is another reason some analysts attributed as the cause of the dip in ETH price. ETH’s revenue dropped massively following an almost 25% decline in the TVL in the DeFi sector and a huge decrease in the trading volume on OpenSea (the biggest NFT platform).