An Ethereum whale woke up from its deep slumber and transferred over $22 million worth of ETH to an empty wallet. This caused the token’s price to briefly jump by $1,500 for the first time since the merge six weeks ago, Santiment observed.
Becoming active after six years, the whale address moved 15,000 ETH at 2:49 UTC on Oct 26. Since this transaction, ETH’s price has risen over 8%.
Back in Aug, another leading blockchain platform Whale Alert tracked down a comatose Ethereum wallet that laid dormant since late 2014. This may be one of the early Ethereum investors who purchased this ETH during the ICO that took place in late July to early September 2014, as the cryptocurrency included in the wallet was pre-mined.
The owner of this wallet has reportedly shifted 200 pre-mined ETH valued at $282,115 after 7.2 years of inactivity.
According to reports, the whale address acquired up to 150,000 ETH in 2014’s Ethereum Genesis sale. On July 31, 2019, exactly five years after the ICO, 5,000 ETH were sent from the address to the Bitfinex3 exchange. ETH was valued at $219 at the time of the $1.095 million transaction.
ETH whale investors continue to hold onto the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap as of September 11.
Ethereum Whales Accumulation Spree
According to Santiment data, 3.5 million additional coins have been added to Ethereum whale accounts that possess one million or more ETH since September 11. The inclusion raised the billionaire whales’ ETH holdings by 14% in the time since the Merge.
In contrast, according to prior Santiment statistics, ETH sharks and whales—the group of investors below billionaire whales that own between 100 and 1 million ETH tokens—have been liquidating their ETH holdings.
The largest portion of the wipeout, $62.74 million worth of liquidated short positions, is accounted for by the cryptocurrency exchange FTX. In the second and third position, respectively, are Okex and CoinEx.
After the price of the ETH token increased by more than 14% over the previous 24 hours, a series of cascading liquidations occurred. The current price of the second-largest cryptocurrency is $1543.