The Ethereum signal: the bulls awoke for the first time in 4 years and transferred $27.2 million worth of tokens

The significant movements of Bitcoin and Ethereum always intrigue the community, as such actions typically have an underlying purpose.

On December 18, the Ethereum bulls (A bullish investor, also known as a “bull,” believes that the price will rise.), who had been dormant for four years, woke up. Two addresses transferred a total of 22,982 ETH. These tokens came from the Genesis and Poloniex trading platforms, and the addresses themselves had been inactive since 2018. This was reported by the blockchain security company PeckShield.

The bulls transferred 13,103.99 ETH and 9,878 ETH, respectively.

It’s interesting that similar activity of these addresses was during the fall in the price of Ether. In 2018, the price of ETH ranged from about $190 to $230. On the transfer day, the asset was worth about $1,200.

As of December 19, the ETH price is going up (although you can’t call it an upsurge because last year, the token was four times more expensive).

Trading volume in 24 hours was $3,888,923,299. In the CoinMarketCap ranking, Ether ranks 2nd with a real market capitalization of $145,234,202,245. There are 122,373,866 coins in circulation.

Ethereum is the second most expensive and popular cryptocurrency. The project was founded in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin and Charles Hoskinson.

This year, Ethereum completed The Merge update and switched to the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, after which mining was no longer necessary. The network’s energy consumption has been reduced by 99.9%, and its carbon footprint is now 0.1 million tons of CO2 per year.

The Shanghai could explode

There’s a big update planned for the Ethereum network in 2023 called The Shanghai. The Merge has effectively replaced mining with stacking, with “stacking” ETH (stETH) tied to the Ethereum Beacon chain. The latter is what the upcoming update is aimed at.

This will make previously staked tokens sent to the Ethereum 2.0 contract prior to the Merge available for withdrawal.

There will also be significant changes to the EVM functionality of the Ethereum blockchain. For example, with the Shanghai update, a reduction in gas fees for Ethereum-based Layer-2 solutions should be implemented.

According to a discussion at the 151st Ethereum Core developer meeting on December 8, the next Ethereum hard-fork (aka Shanghai) will occur tentatively in March 2023.

Given that the Shanghai update “releases” staked ETH, there is a risk that validators will sell their stETH massively as soon as the update is implemented. Which means there will be a large number of offers to sell. And that will likely lead to a sharp drop in prices. 

Nevertheless, the ETH protocol has set a payout limit of 43,200 stashed ETH per day out of more than 10 million, which should help avoid affecting the cryptocurrency’s price.