Ethereum Price (ETH) Shoots Past $1,700 to Hit 5-Month High With Whale Support

After facing a bit of selling pressure on the Fed rhetoric, the crypto market is showing signs of recovery again. The Ethereum price (ETH) is up by 3% in the last 24 hours shooting past $1,700 levels for the first time in five months.

Interestingly, the Ethereum price is currently at the highest level since the merge event in mid-September 2022. As per on-chain data provider Santiment both – shark and whales – have been holding their ETH supplies strongly. It notes: “shark & whale addresses holding 100-100K $ETH still hold nearly 47% of the supply”. The same cohort of investors has also accumulated nearly 2 million ETH since November 5th. 

Ethereum Price Volatility Ahead of Shanghai Upgrade?

The Ethereum Shanghai upgrade scheduled for the next month of March will introduce withdrawals for more than 16.5 million ether (ETH) staked in the blockchain. The Shanghai upgrade is likely to change the ETH supply and demand dynamics in the market and thus traders are expecting Ethereum price volatility going ahead.

With the Shanghai upgrade, $25 billion worth of ETH will be available for withdrawals as well as sale in the open market. Besides, the staking yields for ETH are also likely to decrease after the upgrade. Thus, there’s a possibility that traders would unstake their coins and instead move the capital to other coins that offer better yields.

In his recent podcast interview, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also shared further developments in the Ethereum roadmap. According to him, the main thing to focus on currently is sharding.

With sharding, Ethereum will build a system that supports more transactions than a single node can verify. Thus, it would improve the scalability of the Ethereum blockchain considerably.

Furthermore, Ethereum’s roll-ups centric roadmap seeks to focus on making the Ethereum blockchain friendly to people willing to build Layer 2 scaling solutions that could easily plug into Ethereum for security.