On-chain data from Santiment shows Ethereum whales have sold off over the past year while sharks have bought more of the asset.
Ethereum Sharks Added 3.61 Million ETH To Their Holdings In The Last Year
According to data from an on-chain analytics company Holy, there has been a substantial change in the supply held by the large holders in the ETH market recently. The relevant indicator here is “Supply Distribution,” which tells you what percentage of the Ethereum supply is currently held by a group of wallets.
The wallet group here refers to the cohort that is divided based on the total amount of money they currently hold. For example, the group of coins 1 to 10 includes all addresses in the network that contain the current balance amount between 1 and 10 ETH.
If the Supply Distribution metric is applied to this group, then it will measure (among other things) the combined balance held by wallets that meet these conditions.
Now, in the context of the current discussion, the wallet groups of interest are 10 to 10,000 coins and 10,000 to 10,000,000 coins. Here is a chart showing the Supply Distribution trends for the Ethereum group over the past year:
The values of the two metrics seem to have gone opposite ways in recent months | Source: CryptoQuant
In some groups the first wallet turns into about $17,300 at the bottom and $17.3 million at the top (both at current USD prices), while the second is worth $17.3 million and $17.3 billion.
These groups correspond to two important cohorts in the Ethereum market called sharks and whales. Because these groups hold so many coins, their movements can have a real impact on prices (with whales being the more influential of the two, of course, because they have higher balances in their wallets).
As shown in the chart above, shark ownership has followed a net upward trajectory over the past year, with a more pronounced upward trend following the FTX crash in November 2022.
In total, this cohort added 3.61 million ETH or $6.3 billion to their holdings over the past twelve months. There has also been some rapid accumulation by these holders in the past week, where the supply has increased by around 554,000 ETH.
As for the whale, this humongous owner appears to have spent a net amount of assets over the past year. In total, these investors have distributed 9.43 million ETH during this period, which is approximately $16.4 billion at the current exchange rate.
The cohort has also shown faster selling in the past week, able to take advantage of the current profit-taking opportunity, and has released its holdings by about 717,000 tokens.
It seems that the Ethereum market has undergone a change in the way distribution is distributed among different groups of holders, with smaller holders taking the supply sold by larger holders.
However, despite this significant distribution, Ethereum whales still have 51.4% of the total supply of ETH, while sharks have around 28.8% of the supply in their wallets.
The lowest value of ETH
At the time of writing, Ethereum is trading around $1,700, up 33% over the past week.
ETH surges up | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView
Featured images from Jake Gaviola at Unsplash.com, charts from TradingView.com, Santiment.net