Giant Whale Sells Ether Massively, Earns Millions

, Author: LongHash Joseph Young, reprinted with authorization by Odaily.

Within 48 hours, the price of ETH fell from a peak of $252 on Bitmex to around $190 — a 25% drop in a short period of time.

The sudden drop in the price of ether caused hundreds of millions of dollars in futures to be liquidated. According to Datamish, on March 8, $185 million worth of long contracts were liquidated on the Bitcoin perpetual futures contracts on BitMEX alone.

secondary title

Exchange inflows suggest big players moving ETH

Analysts at Santiment said that based on in-depth research on the addresses of large ETH holders, large holders—investors holding large amounts of cryptocurrency—moved ETH in their wallets to exchanges at the same time that ETH began to plummet.

According to the research team:

A large portion of the daily trading volume in the crypto market comes from futures and leveraged trading platforms, which offer high leverage up to 125 times. Therefore, the short-term price movements of large and small cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ether, will be largely influenced by the operations of large players.

In a highly leveraged environment, a single sell order worth tens of millions of dollars is enough to crash the price of a high-cap cryptocurrency overnight.

But such pending orders can bring huge profits to the seller. “In fact, we have traced an ETH address, which made a net profit of approximately $2.58 million (59.72% ROI),” the research team said.

On March 5, a Santiment report indicated that the top 100 largest ETH holders were hoarding the cryptocurrency. As Santiment pointed out at the time, such buying usually signals bullish sentiment. But this time, given the ensuing aggressive sell-off, it might actually just be an attempt by big players to maximize profits ahead of a bear market.

secondary title

Volume Proves Uncertainty in Rally

Trading volume in the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) bitcoin futures market surpassed $400 million for the first time since late February as the market bounced back. As data from Skew.com shows, the surge in volume in the CME Bitcoin futures market coincided with a plunge in ETH.

LongHashWhen market volume fails to track Bitcoin price action, it means that the trend at hand may just be a bluff before establishing a true direction.