By Alicia Maher
Amidst Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, crypto traders have displayed strange behavior in their crypto transactions.
The Panic Sell
You’d recall that there was an intense sell-off in the crypto market yesterday as traders moved their assets from exchanges to stablecoins. Thus, causing a double-figure decline in crypto market prices, including the prices of the top five digital assets.
Strangely, a blockchain analytics firm, Santiment, observed strange behavior among crypto whales despite the sell-off. The firm observed that some crypto whales are using the current market downtrend as an opportunity to increase their crypto holdings. The buying efforts of these whales caused a slight bounce in BTC price and the price of other top digital assets.
Current Crypto Market Situation
After Vladimir Putin (Russian president) declared war on Ukraine during an early morning broadcast yesterday, the BTC price declined by more than 11%. But, the latest Coingecko data revealed that the market had recovered about 8.5% of those losses within the past 24 hours following the intense buying efforts by the crypto whales.
Despite the criticism of the impending attack from Ethereum’s Canadian-Russian co-founder, Vitalik Buterin, and other stakeholders in the crypto industry, Russia still launched an attack on Ukraine. Within two hours of the president’s Putin war declaration broadcast, BTC price dipped by nearly 11% from $39K to $35K. As usual, the altcoins also dropped, with ETH price slipping from $2.7K to $2.3K.
Even some altcoins suffered a double-digit drop in prices mainly because many holders were selling off their volatile assets (especially cryptos) to purchase stable assets (such as stablecoins and gold). Santiment further tweeted that whale’s crypto transactions were five times more than their activities on typical days.
🐳 #Cryptocurrency #whales have had WILDLY different behavior since #war broke out. Isolated is the past day of key high-tier whale activity to look at the 1-day percent change within each assets' 90-day range of whale holdings. This is about 5x more activity than a typical day. pic.twitter.com/L9H35XMIoO
— Santiment (@santimentfeed) February 25, 2022
The leading cryptocurrency has nearly recouped all its losses from yesterday as of this writing. While ETH is also up by over 10%, other altcoins have surged by similar percentages. But, the current crypto market recovery doesn’t indicate that the market is in full recovery. The events over the next couple of days will determine the actions of traders and the consequences on the crypto market.
The Most Accumulated Token
A new Whalestats data revealed that SHIB is the most accumulated token by crypto whales over the past 24 hours. The data further revealed that each of the top 1,000 ETH whales purchased an average of 85M SHIB tokens. That is, each of them spent more than $2K on their purchases.
JUST IN: $SHIB is back on top 10 purchased tokens by 1000 biggest #ETH whales 🐳🐳
📈 #SHIB current price is $0.00002391, ups 9.6% over the last 24hrs
Woof! Woof! 🐕🐕
Whale leaderboard: https://t.co/28TDZ6JFiD pic.twitter.com/QqNrdYiJKg
— WhaleStats – BabyWhale ($BBW) (@WhaleStats) February 25, 2022
This recent ETH whales’ activity makes them hold a combined 53.9 trillion SHIB tokens (worth over $1.3B based on current SHIB token price). Whalestats further revealed that the largest ETH whale (Light) holds 35.5 trillion SHIB tokens, making her the largest SHIB token holder among ETH whales.
Light bought significant SHIB tokens when the meme-token hit its crucial support of $0.00002020 on the charts. This crypto whales’ activity is responsible for the spike in SHIB price as it gained nearly 11% within the past 24 hours.