Ethereum whales have their eyes open, and with good reason too

Post­ed: Sep­tem­ber 19, 2023

• Ethereum’s $100k+ trans­ac­tions hit their low­est lev­el since 2023 began
• Traders are bear­ish on ETH’s short-term price action

The num­ber of Ethereum [ETH] trans­ac­tions worth over $100,000 has hit a new low in 2023, accord­ing to an update from San­ti­ment. When­ev­er some­thing of this mag­ni­tude occurs, it means that the cohort involved is not excit­ed about the short-term prospect of the cryp­tocur­ren­cy in question.

How much are 1,10,100 ETHs worth today?

Watching out for the right season

On the con­trary, San­ti­ment, in its 18 Sep­tem­ber tweet, opined that it is a dif­fer­ent case as far as ETH is con­cerned. Accord­ing to the on-chain ana­lyt­ics  plat­form, the lack of large trans­ac­tions does not nec­es­sar­i­ly imply dis­in­ter­est. Instead, it sug­gests that whales are prob­a­bly patient and on the look­out for a bet­ter accu­mu­la­tion entry.

🐳 #Bit­coin con­tin­ues to trade between $26K-$27K, and #Ethereum at $1.6K to 1.65K. #Cryp­to’s top mar­ket caps’ $100K+ trans­ac­tion lev­els are at their low­est lev­els of 2023 right now. This is a sign of whales like­ly wait­ing, and not nec­es­sar­i­ly dis­in­ter­est. https://t.co/FKfhB5X3Yh pic.twitter.com/m9990wqlpM

— San­ti­ment (@santimentfeed) Sep­tem­ber 18, 2023

This devel­op­ment was fur­ther rein­forced by the bal­ance of address­es. At the time of writ­ing, Ethereum address­es hold­ing between 10,000 to 10 mil­lion coins have their bal­ance shred­ded. The fall in the bal­ance means that a lot of whales have cashed in on a part of their holdings.

Also, since the prof­it-tak­ing, the whales have refrained from accu­mu­lat­ing. It was a sim­i­lar case with the num­ber of whales with­in the same group. Based on Santiment’s data, the num­ber of address­es hold­ing 10,000 to 10 mil­lion ETH has either flat­lined or decreased since June.

Source: San­ti­ment

No relief in sight?

Inter­est­ing­ly, traders also seem to be on the same page as whales as far as ETH’s next direc­tion is con­cerned. This con­clu­sion was made based on the fund­ing rate at press time. Fund­ing rates are peri­od­ic pay­ments made between longs and shorts.

When the fund­ing rate is pos­i­tive, it means that longs are pay­ing a fund­ing fee to shorts to keep their con­tracts open. In this case, the aver­age trad­er sen­ti­ment is bull­ish. How­ev­er, a neg­a­tive fund­ing rate means that sen­ti­ment is bear­ish and short posi­tions are dom­i­nant in the market.

At the time of writ­ing, ETH’s fund­ing rate had fall­en into the neg­a­tive zone. This means that traders expect ETH to drop below $1,640 in the short term.

Source: Coin­glass

Mean­while, there’s a chance that the per­cent­age of ETH hold­ers in loss may increase if the altcoin’s val­ue decreas­es. At press time, the dai­ly on-chain trans­ac­tion vol­ume in prof­it was 330,000. On the oth­er hand, the dai­ly on-chain trans­ac­tion vol­ume in loss was 511,000.

Real­is­tic or not, here’s ETH’s mar­ket cap in BTC terms

These two met­rics show the aggre­gate amount of coins/tokens across all trans­ac­tions on the net­work that moved in prof­it or loss for a giv­en asset in an interval.

Source: San­ti­ment

As it stands, short-term hold­ers of ETH may have no oth­er option than to wait for a relief peri­od. And to those who can’t tol­er­ate anoth­er decline, they could end up with a loss.