news.bitcoin.com
Five Days, Three Updates
The wallet’s first movements were tracked on Sept. 1, with onchain sleuths reporting that it had received 167,855 $ETH from multiple addresses and deposited 70,739 $ETH, worth about $174 million, into exchanges over the prior two days while still holding 97,115 $ETH. Bitcoin.com News covered that initial move, noting the transfers arrived in 1,000 to 5,000 $ETH batches with ether near $2,430.
The very next day, the running total had ballooned up to 103,252 $ETH, or $253 million, with 64,603 $ETH still in the wallet. The final update landed earlier today when Lookonchain revealed that the whale had finally gotten rid of the entire stash, i.e., 167,855 $ETH, worth $408 million.
This was done by sending the tokens to different exchanges, although it is still unclear as to which exact platforms were the recipients of such a massive haul.
The Market Shrugged
At $408 million, the sale ranks among the largest single-wallet $ETH exits of the year. Yet ether has climbed through it, with the coin trading near $2,520 on Friday, up about 5.2% over 24 hours, with a market capitalization near $307 billion. That is above the roughly $2,430 level at which the first deposits landed.
Demand from other channels helped absorb the supply as U.S. spot ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) took in $141 million of net inflows on Sept. 3, led by Blackrock’s ETHA at $72 million. Spot bitcoin ETFs pulled in $731 million the same day as bitcoin touched $82,000.
The broader backdrop is a market still digesting its best stretch in years. Fidelity Digital Assets noted in its fourth-quarter outlook that ether climbed 34.1% in a single late-August week, outpacing bitcoin’s 25% gain over the same stretch.
Against ether’s roughly $307 billion market value, the whale’s stack amounted to about 0.13% of the total. That is small in aggregate but large for a single seller pushing coins onto order books in a compressed window. The whale’s average exit price works out to roughly $2,430, about 4% below where ether trades now, and the market absorbed more than $400 million of supply in under a week without breaking its uptrend.
Lastly, the exit comes on the heels of other sizable ether sales. On Aug. 21, the “7 Siblings” wallet cluster sold 14,000 $ETH for $32.85 million while address 0xFD10 offloaded 11,252 staked $ETH and 1,824 $ETH, a combined $63 million (at a time when ether traded near $2,350). At press time on Sept. 4, ether is exchanging hands for $2,453 per unit after a bitcoin and broad crypto market sell-off that occurred around 8 a.m. EDT on Friday morning.