Crypto Market Roundup: Alright ETH…Calm Down :O
April 30, 2021
So, Ethereum has gone nuts, right?
Just last week I was talking about >$500 billion being wiped out of the crypto market, but it seems like everything is bouncing back up again.
However, Ethereum has been an absolute beast, not just for this week but also for the last three weeks. It seems like every other day, ETH is charting a new all-time high. This latest surge ended just a hair short of $2,800 ($2,797.97) USD, which it managed to do on April 29.
If that’s not enough, then this week has been barraged with positive Ethereum sentiment.
JPMorgan, Weiss Crypto, and Raoul Pal All High On Ethereum
It seems like the big boys are getting more interested in Ethereum than ever before. American banking giant J.P. Morgan stated that Ethereum should outperform Bitcoin in the long-run since it captures the crypto-native economy,
Ratings firm, Weiss Crypto, reminded their Twitter followers that the open interest and daily volume in ETH futures on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME) has been on a steady rise. Weiss believes that financial institutions and corporations will increase their interest in ETH in the near future.
The European Investment Bank (EIB) announced that they plan to price €100 million in bonds registered in the Ethereum network in two-year notes. Former Goldman Sachs executive Raoul Pal believes that this move is “a test that tacitly accepts that crypto offers better settlement, custody and transfer for the global bond market….securities of all types will migrate across to public blockchains.” According to him, this example shows “how massively dominant ETH currently is for use cases.”
Ethereum Addresses On the Rise, However Whales Pocket Profits
As per a report by ConsenSys, the popular browser wallet MetaMask has seen its monthly active users grow to 5 million — a 5X surge over the last six months. In fact, the accumulated transaction volume has doubled to $2 billion after hitting $1 billion last month.
However, despite this surge in addresses, it seems like the whales are busy selling off to pocket their profits. The following chart shows the total supply held by the top 100 non-exchange addresses.
It looks like, over the last two days, this number has dropped from 32.2 million to 32 million. Of course, it could be possible that these addresses simply moved their ETH to other wallets. However, the following metric shows us that that’s not true.
Exchange Inflow Spikes
This chart shows us the number of ETH tokens flowing into the exchanges. The biggest spike was seen on April 23. Following this, there was another big spike on April 28, which coincides with the drop in whale balance as seen in the chart above. This shows that these addresses most likely sold off these tokens instead of transferring them to another wallet.
However, despite these spikes, the Ethereum price has continued to march on and on.
Dominating The Social Chatter
Unsurprisingly. Ethereum has been dominating the social chatter. The following chart shows increasing social volume over this past week.
As you can see, there were plenty of spikes between April 27 and April 30. In fact, according to Santiment Trends, Ethereum was the most dominant conversation point on April 29, even trumping Elon Musk’s “dogefather” SNL tease!
Now, this isn’t necessarily a good thing. Increased social media activity often leads to FOMO, which brings in the noob investors who flee at the first sign of trouble. It will be interesting to see how ETH holds strong and if it is robust enough to convince these investors to stay in the game.
In Closing
I really don’t want to jinx this, but Ethereum is looking good right now.
The DeFi ecosystem is growing stronger than ever, and it may soon become a $100 billion dollar market. This is a big thing since it shows that Ethereum price will be moving on from mere speculation to pure fundamentals.
What do you think? Let me know!
