Ethereum: Will Alameda’s latest move affect ETH prices?

• Alameda Research’s ETH holdings were moved. 
• Interest from whales in ETH was high.

Ethereum’s [ETH] price rallied quite a bit over the last few weeks, after BTC’s prices surged. This momentum inspired optimism in the market towards ETH, however, it could soon come to an end.

Is ETH in trouble?

Alameda Research, the cryptocurrency trading firm founded by Sam Bankman Fried, recently, moved most of its assets.

One of the largest moves made by the firm was the offloading of a bunch of its ETH. According to lookonchain’s data, the firm transferred 1,643 ETH. This amounted to almost $3.43 million.

Today #FTX/#Alameda transferred ~$22M assets again, including:

6.26M $IMX($9.12M)
20M $GMT($5.29M)
1,643 $ETH($3.43M)
441,425 UNI($2.69M)
77.77B $SHIB($652K)
102,651 $BAL($389K)
2.24M $LOOKS($261K)
801,893 $WOO($179K) pic.twitter.com/VUqWBiNj5G

— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) December 2, 2023

This sell-off could affect the price of ETH going forward. Solana faced a similar issue when news broke that Alameda Research will be allowed to move its funds.

However, SOL was one of their largest holdings, so the potential price response to this move would be very large. The same couldn’t be said about ETH, as Alameda, despite holding a large amount of ETH, could not make a similar level of impact with its sell-off.

Whales show faith

However, the behavior of other whales coinciding with this move could affect market sentiment in the future.

At press time ETH was trading at $2,095.05 and its price had fallen by 0.05%. Luckily for ETH, other whales were not as interested in selling their ETH.

According to Santiment’s data, the percentage of addresses holding ETH had grown. This suggested that large addresses were continuing to show interest in ETH.

If the pattern persists, the growing interest shown by whales may help ETH in resisting massive sell-offs such as the Alameda Research move.

This will play a key role in the future of ETH, especially as the MVRV ratio for ETH grows, which means that the number of ETH holders will be profitable.

Due to this, retail investors may want to sell their holdings in the future for some profit which whale interest may protect ETH against.

Source: Santiment

State of the network

However, the high concentration of whales may have negative consequences for ETH as well.

The whales may be able to manipulate the price of ETH, due to their large positions, and they could leave retail investors in the dust.

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Coming to the state of the network, it was seen that the gas usage on Ethereum remained consistent.

Even though gas usage was on the rise, interest in NFTs on Ethereum had started to fall.

Source: Santiment