The Ethereum price rose from around $1,190 on January 1 to $1,704 last week. Although the pump has been attributed to several factors, whalers are believed to be behind the recent crypto rally. Nonetheless, the highly anticipated Shanghai upgrade that will allow for staked ether withdrawals is also a big factor in the recent pump.
However, the bulls have slowed their initial momentum with ETH prices down around 2.6% in the past 24 hours to trade around $1,632. According to a commonly used indicator, RSI, Ethereum price may correct further in the coming weeks as a declining divergence emerges on an overbought instrument.
Ethereum price under the influence of whales
According to on-chain analytics platform Lookonchain, a mysterious $10+ billion fund has driven Ethereum prices up this year.
According to reports, a series of Ethereum transactions have been identified destined for centralized exchanges such as Binance, Kraken and Coinbase over the past month. Interestingly, each time the mysterious account made a large transfer, the underlying value of Ethereum increased.
The reported whale ETH trader transferred millions of USDC cash from Circle to centralized exchanges.
Secondary notes
The Ethereum market could face a regulatory upheaval from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) if a report from Coinbase Global CEO and founder Brian Armstrong materializes. According to reports, the US SEC intends to ban crypto staking for retail clients.
Notably, the SEC is likely to argue that staking makes crypto projects secure and should be registered under securities law. Therefore, the head of Cardano called Ethereum staking a problem for the entire crypto industry.
