Non-Exchange Ethereum Whales Increasing Holdings By 84%

Ethereum has had some less-than-successful price developments as of late. Even so, ETH whales have opted to continue accumulating the altcoin during this time. Santiment, a crypto data provider, has revealed that the top non-exchange whale addresses have opted to increase their various holdings, doing so by a factor of 80% in August alone.

Defi Seeing Massive ETH Gains

Quite like the ICO boom of 2017, Ethereum had seen its popularity skyrocket in 2020. This was due to the blockchain network serving as the underlying technology behind the next big thing for the crypto industry: Decentralized Finance, or DeFi

With this, Ether (ETH) reacted with a massive YTD increase, managing to record a 2-year high of almost $500 before it dropped back down by 35%.

Exchange Whales Leaving, Non-Exchange Ones Hoarding

While these price dips have occurred, it didn’t seem to phase the resolve of Ethereum investors, who still stand convinced of the long-term prosperity of the project. As provided by Santiment, 100 ETH exchange addresses sold off around $1 million in ETH prior to the price drop recorded. Even so, non-exchange whales have done quite the opposite, continuously taking in larger portions of ETH.

$ETH's top 100 exchange addresses have decreased their tokens held from 16.92M to 15.89M over the past week, a significant decrease of -6.1% in these online bags. From a short-term perspective, this was almost certainly a sparkplug to the -22.3% dump. ?? https://t.co/eZcvHimKGx pic.twitter.com/fGwE8Cywnu

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) September 6, 2020

Santiment had shown that non-exchange ETH whales kicked things into high gear, increasing their various holdings by a factor 0f 84%. Santiment highlighted how the volume of ETH held by these non-exchange whales had jumped up to 5.80 million, as opposed to its previous 3.16 million.

? To clear any doubt that top $ETH whale holders are confident in #crypto's #2 market cap coin, our data indicates the top #Ethereum non-exchange whale increased its holdings by +84% this past month. Their bag jumped from 3.16m to 5.80m in this time span! https://t.co/UIHcZtt4Fy pic.twitter.com/kgJjwuP2qP

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) September 8, 2020

Many Holes To Plug

With the DeFi space exploding in value, a massive amount of congestion reared its ugly head within the Ethereum network. This congestion is only increased once you look at the sheer amount of ERC-20 stablecoins on the blockchain, not to mention the Ponzi schemes crawling out of the woodwork, as well. The end result of this was record-high fees, with investors benign forced to dock out $15 per transaction made at one point.

This situation is slowly starting to reverse, however. On average, these unnaturally high fees have gone back down to $3.4. That is still too much to pay for a transaction. However, that’s a massive improvement from the previous numbers.

Alongside this, developers have come to introduce a new Ethereum Improvement Proposal, EIP-1599, to be exact. This proposal aims to increase the gas limit of Ethereum, while also settling an elastic base transaction fee, which would be automatically burned.

This proposal has already been implemented on a number of test nets, but are not willing to state when this would reach adoption across the entire network. A conservative, rough estimate stated that it would take a coder six months to apply it, should he work alone.