Ethereum Price Holds Firm as Mystery Whale Dumps 167,855 ETH

Five Days, Three Updates

The wallet’s first movements were tracked on Sept. 1, with onchain sleuths reporting that it had received 167,855 ETH from multiple addresses and deposited 70,739 ETH, worth about $174 million, into exchanges over the prior two days while still holding 97,115 ETH. Bitcoin.com News covered that initial move, noting the transfers arrived in 1,000 to 5,000 ETH batches with ether near $2,430.

The very next day, the running total had ballooned up to 103,252 ETH, or $253 million, with 64,603 ETH still in the wallet. The final update landed earlier today when Lookonchain revealed that the whale had finally gotten rid of the entire stash, i.e., 167,855 ETH, worth $408 million.

This was done by sending the tokens to different exchanges, although it is still unclear as to which exact platforms were the recipients of such a massive haul.

The Market Shrugged

At $408 million, the sale ranks among the largest single-wallet ETH exits of the year. Yet ether has climbed through it, with the coin trading near $2,520 on Friday, up about 5.2% over 24 hours, with a market capitalization near $307 billion. That is above the roughly $2,430 level at which the first deposits landed.

Demand from other channels helped absorb the supply as U.S. spot ether exchange-traded funds (ETFs) took in $141 million of net inflows on Sept. 3, led by Blackrock’s ETHA at $72 million. Spot bitcoin ETFs pulled in $731 million the same day as bitcoin touched $82,000.

The broader backdrop is a market still digesting its best stretch in years. Fidelity Digital Assets noted in its fourth-quarter outlook that ether climbed 34.1% in a single late-August week, outpacing bitcoin’s 25% gain over the same stretch.

Against ether’s roughly $307 billion market value, the whale’s stack amounted to about 0.13% of the total. That is small in aggregate but large for a single seller pushing coins onto order books in a compressed window. The whale’s average exit price works out to roughly $2,430, about 4% below where ether trades now, and the market absorbed more than $400 million of supply in under a week without breaking its uptrend.

Lastly, the exit comes on the heels of other sizable ether sales. On Aug. 21, the “7 Siblings” wallet cluster sold 14,000 ETH for $32.85 million while address 0xFD10 offloaded 11,252 staked ETH and 1,824 ETH, a combined $63 million (at a time when ether traded near $2,350). At press time on Sept. 4, ether is exchanging hands for $2,453 per unit after a bitcoin and broad crypto market sell-off that occurred around 8 a.m. EDT on Friday morning.