The total number of addresses that hold over 10,000 ETH hasn’t changed that much since the cryptocurrency reached its new ATH of $2,050 a month ago.
Data from Santiment shows that the number of wallets holding more than 10K ETH (worth somewhere close to $17.7 million at the current price) has declined by only 0.9% over the previous four months. Meanwhile, wallets that hold between 100 to 10K ETH have fallen by 7.2%.
This could be explained by the fact that exchanges, big companies, institutional funds, and so on, hold whale addresses, so they keep the asset in order to invest it later.
Anthony Sassano, a co-founder of ETHhub, has explained that the number of large companies and institutions acquiring ETH is growing:
It seems that mid-tier level addresses are also depositing more ETH into DeFi since the total of the asset that is locked in various protocols in the sector has also gone to reach a new ATH. As of now, it is approximated that the total of ETH locked in DeFi is around 9.6 ETH.
How much is that, you ask? Well, that is 8.3% of the total supply of Ethereum, which would be worth close to $17 billion at the current price. The total amount of ETH locked reached 10 million for the very first time just a week ago, on March 11th.
Furthermore, there are also 3.53 million ETH (worth $6.3 billion) staked on the Beacon Chain, according to information from the Eth2 blockchain explorer.
These two factors have played an important part in Ethereum holding its price levels, which has been oscillating around the $1,800 mark since early March.