Large-scale Ethereum holders have been covertly adding 400k ETH tokens, each worth over $600 million, to their portfolios despite the current market downturn.
Last week, the crypto market was rocked by the events of the collapse of Silver Valley bank and Silvergate Capital, sending Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC prices to utter chaos.
The price of both the tokens has recovered much of its losses incurred last weekend after the U.S. government intervened to stop a potential banking crisis from spreading, while Circle’s USDC stablecoin has reclaimed its dollar peg.
Amidst all these, whales holding between 1,000 to 10,000 Eth units seemed unperturbed by the market turbulence, and continued their accumulation spree, as noted by crypto analyst @Ali_charts.
It is believed that this acquisition, played a key role in the current increase in Ethereum’s price.
At the time of writing this post, Ethereum is up by over 6% in the last 24 hours and over 8% in the weekly index. The 2nd ranked crypto is exchanging hands at $1689, according to data from CoinMarketCap.
Meanwhile, the ETH community has another reason to rejoice as the ecosystem is edging closer to its latest milestone.
The latest significant upgrade to the smart contract blockchain protocol will enable Ethereum’s Beacon Chain to accept withdrawals of ether.
Ethereum Inches Closer To Its Latest Milestone
The soon-to-be-launched modifications would include two updates that would happen simultaneously and be combined to cover every aspect of the upgrade.
Shanghai alludes to changes made to Ethereum’s execution layer, primarily making it possible to deposit staked ETH to execution layer wallets. The Beacon Chain, now known as Capella, must adapt concurrently with the Shanghai hard fork.
Explaining more on the combined upgrades at the execution and consensus layers, Justin Florentine, a staff protocol engineer for Hyperledger Besu at ConsenSys, said,
“It is doubly named because it is the first simultaneous upgrade of ETH’s execution layer and consensus layer, and is highly anticipated because it will enable staked ETH withdrawals.”
The highly anticipated Shanghai upgrade is slated to go live on the Ethereum mainnet in early April. The Shapella upgrade was completed on March 14 on the Goerli test network, which enables development testing prior to mainnet deployments, pushing the original timeframe from March 2023.