Troubling times ahead for Ethereum holders? This week, an Ethereum Whale has funneled approximately 20,000 ETH to Bitfinex. The total worth: more than $5.5 million at the time of writing! Who the investor is, is currently not known. What is known, however, is that the anonymous investor received more than 314,000 ETH from the network’s Genesis block as a result of an investment in the Ethereum initial coin offering (ICO).
It seems that one of the first “Ethereum whales” is having second thoughts about his investment, after moving such a large amount of ETH to Bitfinex. The movement of the large amount of ETH from the investor’s wallet was firstly discovered by California-based attorney Zoe Dolan. Dolan, who has been monitoring wallets holding funds that originated in the Ethereum Genesis block for evidence of “capitulation.”, revealed her discovery on Twitter.
As can be seen below, the Ethereum investor moved the funds about 2 days ago. The unknown investor’s original wallet, meanwhile, still holds more than 104,000 ETH, worth approximately $28 million.
While the 20,000 ETH may represent a small portion of the wallet’s initial balance, it’s not the first time that this unknown investor has moved a large amount of ETH to Bitfinex. In May, the wallet funneled more than 116,000 ETH — worth ~$65 million at the time — out of the original wallet, and most of these funds appear to have eventually ended up at the exchange in a series of transactions made over the course of the next several months.
It has to be seen if large Ethereum holders will keep moving funds and sell Ethereum in the upcoming months. Arthur Hayes, co-founder and CEO of BitMEX, named Ether (ETH) a “shitcoin” earlier this month. Hayes claimed, among other things, that ETH is going to fall below $ 100 very soon.
Moreover, the BitMEX founder said that many of Ether’s investors were venture capitalists who had been lured in because of the skyrocketing prices of cryptocurrencies in late 2017. However, now that they’ve seen the crypto market shed over $600 billion since January 2017, many VCs may just decide to dump their Ether and/or ERC-20 tokens because they might not be able to stomach more losses.
That said, it seems unlikely that Ether’s price will fall below $100, or even below $200 – because many more legitimate projects have recently been launched on the Ethereum blockchain.
