It is consolidation time for Ethereum whales as they seem to be on an accumulation spree. This is borne out by data provided by an advanced crypto tracker. An ETH whale has just moved 81,000 ETH estimated to be $35 million to another unknown ETH wallet.
The increased trading in Ethereum has neared a record this week. The last high was on Jan 4, 2018, when the average market price of the crypto asset was $1,042. At the start of last week, the transaction count was within handshaking distance of 1.27 million.
Whales in the Ethereum environment are traders or investors who typically own a large number of the crypto asset. One Ethereum whale with a single Ethereum address would be typically owning 1,000 Ethereum or more.
Currently, the top 100 wallets control about 25% of the Ethereum supply. This observation is made by top Blockchain data analysis firm Santiment who tweeted that as per prevailing trends, there is a large-scale centralization of Ethereum in the top wallets. It proves that the whales are consolidating as the second most valuable crypto asset after Bitcoin continues above the $420 mark.
The price of $431 and the spike in activity augurs well for Ethereum holders.
Ethereum whales generally lie low in the transaction market, accounting for a mere 7 percent of the activities while controlling more than a third of the entire circulating supply of this crypto asset.
A new study by a top crypto analysis firm Chainalaysis has an interesting take on Ethereum whales. Their large sell-offs sometimes fuel the volatility of the Ethereum market; their dormant holdings do not make a substantial impact on the price of Ethereum. It is because the whales prefer to keep their holdings away from the exchanges.
In another interesting research released by Chainalaysis on May 1, 2019, out of the top 500 Ethereum whales, 376 were individual whales while the remaining 124 were from services. This lot together controlled 33 percent of the Ethereum supply in 2019.
Ethereum is a cryptocurrency that is optimized for decentralized applications and smart contracts. The Blockchain structure of nodes linked with each other ensures that the contracts are entirely safe and secured, and cannot be changed by a third-party intervention.
By its very structure, Ethereum can’t go offline. Not only is Ethereum fully decentralized and independent, but it is also connected through computing systems around the world to thousands of users.