Assessing Ethereum's weekend slip and what's next for the market

ETH’s selling pressure was stronger than buying pressure.
The market’s sentiment shifted from neutral to greed, indicating a potential rise in buying in the days ahead.

Ethereum [ETH] continued to retreat during the weekend, falling as low as $2,407 as of this writing, according to CoinMarketCap.

The largest altcoin fell 2.64% over the last 24 hours, with weekly losses of more than 4%.

Assessing ETH’s next moves

Taking stock of the developments, popular technical analyst Ali Martinez noted that ETH was in a crucial zone. The bounce from the support at $2,388 could potentially drive ETH higher.

Having said that, he also had a word of caution for market traders, remarking,

“If ETH fails to maintain this level, we might see a pullback to the next significant support area around $2,000.”

Well, the mood in the market wasn’t exactly bullish. According to AMBCrypto’s analysis of CryptoQuant data, the ratio of ETH’s buy volume to sell volume of takers has been below 1 for the last 1o days.

This meant that more sellers were willing to sell at a lower price, in turn, signaling that selling pressure was stronger than buying pressure at the time of writing.

Source: CryptoQuant

Whales go quiet

Another notable aspect that grabbed attention was the activity of whale investors. Using Santiment’s data, AMBCrypto spotted a dramatic fall in large ETH transactions over the past 10 days.

Note how the surge in transactions from the period between the 7th to the 10th of January caused a spike in ETH’s price, indicating that whales were accumulating.

However, the ascent was halted as the whales withdrew. Since then, ETH has been range-bound.

Source: Santiment

ETH’s reserves on exchanges dropped over the past week as well. This was a sign that whales were in a HODLing mood.

Derivatives traders are bearish on ETH, but…

A look at ETH’s derivatives market highlighted that bearish leveraged traders were dominant at press time.

According to Coinglass, ETH’s Longs/Shorts Ratio has been below 1 since the 12th of January, implying that positions betting on price declines were more than those gunning for price increases.