After the U.S. Federal Reserve (Fed) Chairman Powell announced yesterday (20th) that "interest rate cuts are expected to be reduced next year", both the U.S. stock market and the crypto market showed a downward trend.
At present, this wave of plunge seems to be continuing. Bitcoin began to fluctuate and fall from the high of US$102,800 at 22:30 last night, and hit a low of US$95,700 in the early morning of today, a drop of 7%; Ethereum also began to fluctuate and fall from the high of US$3,700 last night, and hit a low of US$3,283 at the time of writing, a drop of more than 10%.
Whales sell nearly 50,000 ETH to pay off debts
In this wave of crypto market battle royale, a whale was forced to sell a huge amount of ETH in order to repay the on-chain debt, which is considered to be possible. According to Lookonchain monitoring, a whale deposited 22,746 ETH (worth about 77.33 million US dollars) to Binance this morning, and withdrew USDT and USDT from Binance for a total of about 57.82 million US dollars to repay the debts on DeFi protocols Spark and Aave.
According to the observation of Dynamic Zone, this whale deposited another 27,000 ETH (worth about 91.8 million US dollars) into Binance in the past 3 hours, and withdrew 80 million USDT from Binance back to the chain.
Is this whale the culprit for the Ethereum crash?
On the other hand, as the market continues to fall, Ethereum's decline (-7.95%) is significantly greater than mainstream currencies such as Bitcoin (-3.64%), XRP (-3.74%), and BNB (-3.87%). So is this whale the culprit of the plunge?
If we only look at the market trading volume, the Binance exchange's ETH trading volume in the past 24 hours was US$3.84 billion. However, judging from the amount of stablecoins withdrawn by the above-mentioned whale, this whale did not sell all the ETH transferred to the exchange.
Therefore, the author speculates that this whale should only sell ETH worth US$173 million, and this trading volume accounts for 4.5% of Binance's nearly 24-hour trading volume. This huge trading volume will definitely affect the market.
In addition, we find out the time when the whale address transferred ETH to Binance and extracted stablecoins from Binance to the chain to determine whether there was a sharp drop during this period. The author summarizes it as follows:
The first sale took place between 6:51am and 8:13am, with Ethereum falling from a high of $3,465 to $3,400, a drop of 1.9%.
The second sale took place from 9:36am to 12:22pm, with Ethereum falling from a high of $3,465 to $3,402, a drop of 1.9%.
Judging from the price chart, although the decline during this period was not entirely caused by the whale, it still had a certain influence. The author speculates that the whale may have adopted a gradual selling strategy to avoid an excessive decline in ETH prices.
