On May 6, the Ethereum Foundation sent 15,000 ETH worth $29.7 million to Kraken, blockchain data from Etherscan shows. On the same day, one of Vitalik Buterin’s Ethereum wallet addresses also made a sizeable transfer of 200 ETH worth $396,000 to the exchange.

Market participants speculated that this high-value transfer implied Ethereum Foundation was selling the market top. Incidentally, the Ethereum Foundation’s previous large sales have coincided with ETH’s price trading at local tops.

Several traders took this as a signal that history would repeat itself and proceeded to sell their own ETH holdings.

https://twitter.com/StrongHedge/status/1655484008355049475

 

The past few weeks have also seen an uptick in ETH transfers, mostly due to speculative trading of newly created meme coins, which has led to higher gas fees for transactions. However, with the mechanics of EIP-1559 now in play, a record amount of ETH was burned in the process. 

Still, despite fears that the second largest cryptocurrency might face more sell pressure in the days to come, some industry watchers had cause to be optimistic. 

According to a dashboard created by “@sankin” on Dune, the total value of staked deposits on the Beacon chain exceeds the value of withdrawals. At the time of writing, there was around 2.32 million ETH deposited and 2.28 million ETH withdrawn.

Ethereum was trading at $1,859 at press time, down 2.5% in the last 24 hours. Bitcoin was trading at $27,900, down 3% over the same period.