Ethereum “Mega Whales” Grow In Numbers While “Mid-Tier” Whales Resolve to Profit-Booking

After hitting a new all-time high of $1439 on Tuesday, January 19, Ethereum (ETH) continues to remain under pressure! At press time, the ETH price is 4.38% down trading at $1252 with its market cap slipping below $150 billion.

Despite strong on-chain fundamentals, the Ethereum price is failing to sustain crucial supports this is because the whale activity is getting pretty interesting at this point. Explaining the Ethereum Hodlers Distribution, on-chain data provider Santiment shows that mid-tier and smaller Ethereym whale addresses (100-10K ETH) have resolved to profit booking soon as the price approached a new all-time high.

On the other hand, whale addresses with over 10,000+ ETH continue to grow in numbers. It looks like the small players are losing their supplies to the big ones.

Just like Bitcoin (BTC), the Ethereum (ETH) supplies at the exchanges have been reducing over the last few weeks. As per Glassnode, the Ethereum active supply has tanked significantly in recent times.

???? #Ethereum $ETH Active Supply 1y-2y (1d MA) just reached a 3-year low of 15,221,670.324 ETH

Previous 3-year low of 15,222,739.931 ETH was observed on 17 January 2021

View metric:https://t.co/UacpFoEAvd pic.twitter.com/ybuCalh3Wl

— glassnode alerts (@glassnodealerts) January 21, 2021

There’s been some buzz around institutional participation in Etheruem with the upcoming launch of CME Ether Futures after three weeks. Recently, the NYDIG CEO said that big institutions were only interested in Bitcoin. In a rebuttal, Grayscale CEO Michael Sonnenshein said that although BTC remains the first choice of institutions there’s an increasing push with diversification, and yes ETH remains the choice of institutions.

some of the growth we've experienced in $BCH and $ETH is attributable to institutions I would have never guessed would allocated outside of #bitcoin 18 months ago pic.twitter.com/h6jGtoip7L

— Michael Sonnenshein (@Sonnenshein) January 17, 2021

Can Defi Help ETH Rally in 2021?

On Wednesday, Fundstrat analyst David Grider said that ETH can rally all the way to $10,500. Grider believes that the Ethereum 2.0 network upgrade and the DeFi expansion will help fuel this rally. Thus, he referred to Ether as the best risk/reward investment at this stage.

However, going against the popular belief that the Ethereum network will benefit the most from the DeFi wave, Ripple’s Head of DeFi Michael Zochowski says Ethereum “will continue to lose ground” due to slow Ethereum 2.0 developments. “I believe at least 25% of the value deployed in DeFi by the end of 2021 will be on networks other than Ethereum,” he added.

Interestingly, investor confidence in Ethereum continues to grow as the Ethereum 2.0 network now holds more than $3.6 billion worth of ETH in deposits contracts.