The number of Ethereum whales [i.e., large entities who held massive amounts of ETH tokens] has been pretty consistent since the crash in February last week. However, in the latest development, an unknown whale just transferred more than 629,000 ETH.
According to Whale Alert’s tweet on the same, the recipient wallet to which almost $1.3 billion was sent was the smart contract for the decentralized finance [DeFi] protocol Compound contract.
The sender remained anonymous. According to the data available, the whale paid a gas fee of 0.0205 ETH, that is more than $43. However, the movement of a large sum of money coincided with the price of the second-largest crypto-asset hitting an all-time high on the 2nd of April.
Upon further inspection, it was found that the same Compound contract received around 300 ETH from another unknown wallet the previous day, and 13,000 ETH $27 million a couple of days ago.
DeFi Captures Interest of Ethereum Whales
Over the past few weeks, large ETH holders have refrained from offloading their bags. As per the latest stats, the number of wallets holding over 10K ETH has declined by less than 1% over the last four months. Meanwhile, 100-10,000 ETH addresses have taken a much more substantial plunge of 7.2% over the same time period.
In fact. The mid-tier level addresses were found to be pouring more ETH tokens into DeFi.
This was evident in the above chart compiled by DeFi Pulse, which indicated that Ethereum locked across all decentralized finance [DeFi] protocols have soared to an all-time high of $10.224 million as of the 4th of April.
It is important to note that the amount of the token locked topped 10 million for the first time ever on the 11th of March. As price took a tumble, the DeFi figure also remained dull before establishing a major top.
Additionally, it is worth noting that some of Ethereum’s circulating supply was also directed towards its Beacon Chain, which is essentially a Proof-of-Stake [PoS] blockchain. This was indicative of the onset of Ethereum’s transformation of consensus mechanism from Proof-of-Work [PoW] to Proof-of-Stake.