ETH hoarding trend in full swing
Editor's Note: This article comes fromUnitimes（ID：Uni-times）Editor's Note: This article comes from
, by Nick Chong, published with permission.
After weeks of underperformance, ETH has staged a strong rally in recent days, hitting $245 on Saturday, its highest price since early March. While prices have retreated more than 4% since then, a growing backing of prominent investors has backed the asset, limiting its decline.
Over the past year, ETH's largest investors have been busy buying large amounts of ETH, new data shows.
This accumulation trend has driven the holdings of so-called "whale addresses" to a 10-month high, with these investors now collectively holding more than 21.8 million ETH.
Meanwhile, whales are not the only ones accumulating ETH. The cryptocurrency also attracted significant institutional inflows in the first half of the year, recent data shows.
Top 100 wallets now hold over $4.5 billion worth of ETH
The price action of ETH in 2019 and 2020 has not yet acquired a decisive upward trend. However, ETH’s biggest investors don’t seem to view the recent price action as indicative of its mid- to long-term outlook, as ETH holdings among the top 100 non-exchange addresses by ETH holdings just hit a 10-month high .
Blockchain data platform Santiment talked about this in an article [1], providing data showing how significant this ETH accumulation trend is.
“ETH whale addresses (holdings) just hit a 10-month high, with the cumulative holdings of the top 100 non-exchange wallets already exceeding 21.8M ETH (worth ~$4.5B at current prices). This is the largest holding among the top 100 addresses since May 2019.”
An interesting factor, Santiment also noted, is that while ethereum has barely ushered in technical or fundamental change, some of this ETH accumulation has already occurred over the past two days.
“These top ETH whale addresses added 145,000 ETH (worth ~$30,300,000) in the past two days alone (as of May 27th), as the price of ETH rose a little over 4% during that time.”
Top VCs start hoarding ETH "again"
You may not know his name, but Garry Tan was one of the first people in Silicon Valley to be bullish on cryptocurrencies.
According to this article[2] from venture accelerator 500 Startups, Garry's fund, Initialized Capital, was "an early investor in industry pioneers like Coinbase and Instacart." That said, Garry is a seed investor in Coinbase, which was last valued at $8 billion. According to Garry himself, he also holds some BTC, and his first BTC was given to him by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
Now, it is clear that he also holds ETH.
On May 30, he tweeted that he had “started hoarding ETH again,” adding in subsequent comments that he was doing it for “long-term holdings,” not short-term trades.
It is worth noting that the managing partner of Initialized Capital also said that he has been "accumulating Satoshi" (Note: Satoshi (sats) is the smallest unit of Bitcoin). This would show that he is also bullish on Bitcoin.
It is unclear how much crypto assets he owns, or how much ETH he will buy, but it shows that investors have been more inclined to accumulate crypto assets in recent months.
Meanwhile, in a recent interview with The Defiant founder Camila Russo, Cameron Winklevoss, co-founder of cryptocurrency trading platform Gimini, had this to say about his and his twin brother’s ETH holdings:
“We definitely own a lot of ETH. They’re huge. Yes, quite a lot… We made a concerted effort to buy a lot of ETH a few years ago.”
He added that their ETH investment is "in the same galaxy" as their $1 billion Bitcoin holdings.
Whales aren't the only investors accumulating ETH
At the same time, ETH ushered in a large amount of institutional capital inflows in the first quarter of this year.
This trend is clearly seen in data obtained from Grayscale Investment’s Ethereum Trust (GETH), which saw institutional inflows worth $110 million in the first quarter of this year.
While the company's second-quarter report is yet to be released, there's a good chance the trend has remained strong over the past few months.
Nearly 60% of ETH Hasn't Moved in a Year
Major investors in ETH appear to be taking a long-term approach to their ETH positions.
According to data from cryptocurrency analytics platform Glassnode, 57% of ETH's supply has not moved in over a year.
As Anthony Sassano, Product Evangelism Manager at Set Protocol tweeted, citing Glassnode’s data release:
“Approximately 57% of ETH supply has not moved on-chain in over 1 year; approximately 16% has not moved in over 3 years.”
One factor driving the trend of accumulating ETH among whales and institutions is the meteoric growth of the Ethereum network.
Meanwhile, Spencer Noon, head of cryptocurrency investments at DTC Capital, recently explained that there is a link between ETH’s utility and its demand. If this is the case, then the growing number of stablecoin issuance on the Ethereum blockchain and the rapidly developing DeFi market may further continue the current ETH accumulation model.
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