Venture capital giant Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) has been sending over a million dollars’ worth of MakerDAO’s governance token MKR to crypto exchange Coinbase every day for the last week.
According to blockchain data firm Spot On Chain, wallets belonging to a16z deposited a total of 9,223 MKR, worth around $9.7 million, to the crypto exchange. The firm also noted that the price of MKR seemed to drop after the deposits were made.
🚨 a16z (@a16z) deposited 1,380 $MKR to #Coinbase at $1,115 ($1.54M) 11hrs ago.
a16z has been depositing $MKR to #Coinbase daily for the past week (total: 9,223 $MKR at $1,055 on avg, ~$9.73M)
and $MKR price seemed to drop post-deposits.
a16z still holds 16,536 $MKR ($17.62M). https://t.co/e7D1yNDmML pic.twitter.com/1ALpzvWWcP
— Spot On Chain (@spotonchain) July 24, 2023
Meanwhile, MakerDAO founder Rune Christensen has been seen accumulating MKR through a series of on-chain swaps. Over the last week, he swapped a total of 1.61 million DAI, Maker’s algorithmic stablecoin, for MKR at an average price of $998 per token.
Europe-based firm CMS Holding was also observed acquiring MKR from centralized exchanges Binance and Bitget over the last month. However, on-chain researchers noted that the firm potentially realized a $200,000 profit if the 525 MKR sent to Binance on July 21 was indeed a sale.
The accumulation and selling may have something to do with MKR’s volatile price action last week. The token rallied 30% to a one-year high above $1,200 on Friday but has since receded and was changing hands for around $1,074 at the time of writing.
An incentive for some of the profit-taking was likely fuelled by a token buyback scheme, which went live last Wednesday. The program was triggered after the surplus buffer passed the $50 million mark and activated a smart burn engine which periodically allocates excess DAI from the buffer to purchase MKR from a Uniswap pool.
