According to on-chain data, the ten largest Ethereum whales have recently continued to increase their holdings and currently hold 41 million ETH.
The holdings of the top 10 Ethereum whales have reached an all-time high.
According to data from on-chain analytics firm st tly, the largest whale wallet, has continued to show a bullish pattern for cryptocurrencies. There are two indicators of interest here: The supply held by the top exchange wallets and the supply held by the top non-exchange wallets.
The former tracks the total amount of Ethereum currently held by the top 10 wallets connected to centralized exchanges. By comparison, the latter measures the amount of money held in the ten largest self-custodial wallets on the blockchain.
Both types of addresses are considered “whales,” but addresses connected to exchanges are more likely to control entities, such as the platform itself, rather than “regular” investors, such as self-managed wallets.
The chart below shows how the Ethereum supply held by these two groups has changed over the past year.
The value of the two metrics have gone opposite ways in recent days | Source: Santiment on X
The graph shows that over the past year, the supply held by the top 10 whales outside of exchanges has continued to increase, while addresses linked to exchanges have increased and decreased somewhat.
Typically, investors store their coins in self-managed wallets whenever they want to hold them for a long period of time. Therefore, it is undoubtedly a positive sign for cryptocurrencies that these OTC whales continue to increase supply.
As the chart shows, the supply of these whales has continued its recent upward trend, exceeding 41 million ETH, a new all-time high.
While this was an upward trend, the top 10 Ethereum exchange wallets also showed a downward trend. This is because the ETH currently held is only 8 million ETH, the lowest in about 24 weeks.
Supply shifts to self-managed are always a good sign of the health of the market. Because the bankruptcy of the FTX exchange has already shown us what happens when such a central platform goes bankrupt during a bear market.
The less ETH that exists on an exchange, the less impact it will have on the price if it goes out of business. And that’s not all. The supply on exchanges can also be considered the salable supply of ETH, which has also decreased due to this decline.
Therefore, this pattern of self-managed wallets growing in size while exchanges are losing coins is an encouraging development for the asset. While that may be true, concentrated supply in just 10 wallets is still a negative. Because this massive entity now controls a third of the supply.
ETH price
As of this writing, Ethereum is trading just below $2,100, down 1% over the past week.
ETH has overall gone up during the past 24 hours | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView
Featured image by Vivek Kumar on Unsplash.com, Charts by TradingView.com, Santiment.net