On-chain data from Santiment shows that Ethereum whales sold off over the past year, while sharks bought more assets.
Ethereum Sharks added 3.61 million ETH to their holdings last year
According to data from the on-chain analysis firm Holy, there has been a substantial change in the supply of large holders in the ETH market recently. The relevant indicator here is “Supply Distribution”, which tells us what percentage of the Ethereum supply is currently held by which wallet groups.
Wallet groups here refer to cohorts divided by the total number of coins they currently hold. For example, the 1-10 coin group includes all addresses on the network that have a balance between 1 and 10 ETH at the moment.
If the supply distribution metric is applied to this group, it will measure (among other things) the combined balance held by the portfolios that meet this condition.
Now, in the context of the current discussion, the portfolio groups of interest are the 10 to 10,000 coin and 10,000 to 10,000,000 coin cohorts. Here is a graph showing the trend in the distribution of supplies for these Ethereum pools over the past year:
The values of the two metrics seem to have gone opposite ways in recent months | Source: CryptoQuant
The range of the first set of wallets becomes around $17,300 on the low end and $17.3 million on the high end (both at current USD pricing), 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. Since these groups hold such large amounts of coins, their movements can sometimes have a noticeable effect on price (whales are the more influential of the two, naturally, as they have significantly higher balances in their wallets).
As shown in the chart above, shark holdings have been on a net upward trajectory over the past year, with an especially steeper uptrend seen after the FTX crash in November 2022.
In total, this cohort has added 3.61 million ETH or $6.3 billion to their holdings over the last twelve months. There has also been a rapid buildup of these holders in the last week, where their supply has grown by around 554,000 ETH.
As for the whales, these hulking holders appear to have dumped a net amount of the asset over the past year. In total, these investors have distributed a whopping 9.43 million ETH in this period, which is equivalent to about $16.4 billion at current exchange rates.
The cohort also showed a faster sell-off in the past week, possibly to take advantage of the current profit-taking opportunity, and unloaded their holdings of roughly 717,000 tokens.
It seems that the Ethereum market has undergone a change in the way supply is distributed among different groups of holders, with the smaller holders collecting the supply that the larger holders sell.
However, despite this significant distribution, Ethereum whales still hold around 51.4% of the total ETH supply, while sharks hold around 28.8% of the supply in their wallets.
ETH price
As of this writing, Ethereum is trading around $1,700, up 33% in the past week.
ETH surges up | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView
Featured Image by Jake Gaviola on Unsplash.com, Charts from TradingView.com, Santiment.net
