Ethereum: Is ETH’s hike making traders take riskier bets?

Journalist

Posted: February 21, 2024

• Ethereum maintained a bullish bias on the price charts.
• The supply distribution offered an interesting insight.

Ethereum [ETH] broke out past the $2.6k resistance that the sellers defended since mid-January. The recent uptrend saw a massive uptick in the Open Interest behind Ethereum.

A recent Santiment post on X (formerly Twitter) noted that Bitcoin [BTC] and Ethereum noted large increases in the OI. For ETH, the last time the OI was at $5.4 billion was back in March 2022.

Source: X

A recent AMBCrypto report underlined the bullish sentiment behind ETH on the 12-hour chart. It also noted that a retracement to the range highs at $2.6k would present a buying opportunity.

A closer look at the bullish sentiment behind Ethereum

Source: Santiment

The strong surge in Open Interest in recent weeks was not the only metric that signaled bullish conviction behind the king of altcoins. The Funding Rate was also consistently positive.

This showed that long positions remained dominant for a good chunk of the past three months.

The dormant circulation saw a large spike on the 15th of February. This was followed by a minor retracement to the $2.7k mark, but Ethereum bulls have recovered since then.

However, the increasing supply on exchanges metric suggested that selling pressure could begin to rise and undo the gains made in recent weeks.

The address balance showed distribution was in play

Source: Santiment

The price trend mentioned earlier saw a breakout past the $2.6k level and has trended upward since October.

The Open Interest has also been steadily rising over the past two months, reinforcing the idea that conviction was strong. Speculators were willing to bet their capital that ETH was about to register further gains.

Yet, the supply distribution chart above showed that addresses holding any amount of Ethereum from 0 to 10 million have been selling over the past three months.

The whale category (blue) saw an uptick in early January, but this was quickly reversed. This indicated that ETH holders had sold some of their assets slowly in recent months.

How much are 1,10,100 ETHs worth today?

The addresses with 10 million or more ETH were also climbing, which could also explain why the metric above, as a percentage, has slowly fallen.

This shouldn’t inspire panic amongst Ethereum investors, but it is something for them to take note of. Other on-chain metrics continued to signal bullish conditions.