coinedition.com
A mysterious fund has been influencing the price of Ethereum over the past two months. The fund is essentially a USDC whale that withdraws hoards of USD Coin from Circle and converts it into USD Tether (USDT). The USDT is then sent to several exchanges and subsequently floods the crypto market.
According to on-chain analytics firm Lookonchain, the mysterious fund has started pouring money into the crypto market ahead of the bull market witnessed at the beginning of the year. The fund began withdrawing USDC from Circle on December 7 last year into a wallet that became active a week prior to the first withdrawal.
1/ A mysterious fund started pouring money into the crypto market ahead of this year's small #BullMarket.
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) February 9, 2023
The fund started withdrawing $USDC from #Circle on Dec 7, 2022 and has over 10B $USDC as of today.
Then exchanged for $USDT via 5 addresses, and deposited to exchanges. pic.twitter.com/n4UiVWSbHe
The withdrawn USDCs were then exchanged for USDT using five addresses. The USDT tokens were sent to several crypto exchanges, including Binance and Coinbase. Data from Etherscan shows that the fund has withdrawn over 1 billion USDC from Circle since December 7 2022.
The fund has withdrawn more than 50 million USDC over the past 24 hours. However, at the time of writing, the wallet only had about $80 worth of crypto in it. When asked about the funds, Lookonchain revealed that they were already exchanged for USDT and transferred to crypto exchanges.
The latest ETH pump from this fund’s USDC movement came earlier this week. On February 6, the mysterious fund initiated a series of USDC withdrawals from Circle. By February 7, it had withdrawn nearly 100 million USDC. A clear pump in Ethereum’s price is visible on the same day. ETH rose almost 5% that day, going from $1611 to $1688 within a span of 24 hours.