Despite Ethereum’s nearly 20% increase in the last 7 days, whales continue to accumulate large amounts.
According to SpotOnChain data, a whale is said to have accumulated more than $150 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) through Binance and the 1inch decentralized exchange.
In the last 24 hours, this giant whale has bought a total of 54,721 ETH with multiple buy orders, including 29,875 ETH on Binance and 24,846 ETH through 1inch DEX, with an average price around $2,845.
This massive whale just allegedly bought another 22,719 $ETH ($65.7M) at ~$2,893 in the past 50 minutes, including:
• withdrew 19,226 $ETH ($55.6M) from #Binance
• swapped 10.1M $USDT for 3,493 $ETH via #1icnhIn total, the whale has allegedly bought 54,721 $ETH via Binance… https://t.co/5XppfMigdf pic.twitter.com/UCL1VB01lW
— Spot On Chain (@spotonchain) February 19, 2024
It is noteworthy that when checking the portfolio through the SpotOnChain platform, this wallet address currently holds a total of 74,383 ETH equivalent to $216.54 million. This means, this whale owned 19,662 ETH before taking action to accumulate nearly three times that amount in the last 24 hours.
In addition to the massive ETH amount, this whale’s wallet also holds about 5,485 stETH (Lido Finance’s liquid staking asset) worth nearly $16 million, transferred from HTX exchange 11 days ago, and still has 29.9 million USDT stablecoins. The total value of the wallet at the time of writing is recorded at $262.5 million.
It is possible that this whale believes the Ethereum DenCun upgrade, scheduled for mid-March 2024, will boost the growth of ETH in the near future. This is further evidenced by owning $16 million stETH, which is expected to increasingly attract large-scale adoption, with the potential to reach billions of dollars in value.
The total value locked (TVL) of projects in this segment has increased by 300% in the past year to $5 billion. Liquid staking protocols like Lido, Rocket Pool, ssv.network, and Stader are becoming familiar names to investors in the industry since Ethereum successfully executed The Merge event, switching to Proof-of-Stake mechanism in September 2022, and subsequently unlocking ETH staking after the Shanghai upgrade in April 2023.
The DenCun upgrade also greatly benefits cross-chain bridge solutions through EIP-4788 and EIP-4844. By minimizing reliance on oracles, which were one of the attack vectors causing $1 billion in damage in 2022, DenCun will help strengthen the network, improve infrastructure, and provide growth incentives for the entire Ethereum ecosystem for the next phase.
At the time of writing, the price of ETH is trading around $2,913, up about 4% in the last 24 hours and 18% over the past 7 days.