Recent research indicates that top Ethereum whales are heavily accumulating ETH. They are waiting for updates that could boost the price of the cryptocurrency.

It is a few days before the Bitcoin halving event, which will reduce the number of new coins issued. However, the whales of the cryptocurrency community are not just accumulating Bitcoin (BTC) waiting for the halving to cause a further increase in price. According to recently revealed data, major investors are also accumulating Ether (ETH).

Adam Cochran, Executive at DuckDuckGo, a privacy-focused search engine, said that he manually audited about 10,000 Ethereum addresses. The objective was to examine ETH whales’ activity, profitability, liquidity, and market manipulation.

Current ETH whales have increased their positions by more than USD 550 million, or 4%, in the past six months. This contrasts with the estimated USD 600 million in new capital inflow that Bitcoin had over the past year, according to Cochran.

The executive of DuckDuckGo noted that it is not just the existing whales that are accumulating. He said that there are a significant number of new wallets among the top ten, which conducted their first transaction on fiat-ramp exchanges, such as Gemini, Kraken, and Coinbase, which serve large-scale customers.

These new addresses usually buy between USD 100,000 and 250,000 worth of Ether.  They represent about 6% of the richest 10,000 addresses, about USD 100 million in new ETH purchases in the past six months, as he said.

Both new and existing whales bought more than USD 650 million worth of Ether last semester, more than the total flow of Bitcoin funds in the year 2019.

The data indicate that big investors do not seem interested in selling their holdings of ETH, either.

Right now, there are only 19.5 million Ethers listed on exchanges for sale. Even if 33.6 million ETHs are deposited on exchanges, this represents only 58% of the deposits. Therefore, whales are accumulating rather than selling. This figure has historically been above 75% whenever the price of ETH has risen by more than 25%. It is the first time in history that ETH has increased by more than 50% and the figure has dropped below 80%.

Data from cryptocurrency analysis company Glassnode confirms the Cochran survey and indicate that ETH investors are showing strong HODLING behavior. In the case of ETH, the data show that 77.7% of the tokens in circulation did not move in six months. In one year, 57.6% of ETH did not change hands, and 31.6% remained immobile for two full years.

Another survey, conducted by a Reddit user, revealed that Grayscale, one of the best-known companies in the cryptocurrency sector, bought around 50% of all Ether mined in the year 2020. According to the poll, Grayscale has bought 756,539 ETH since the beginning of this year. This represents 48.4% of all the crypto coins mined since early 2020. A total of 1,563,245 ETH were mined during this time.

By Alexander Salazar

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