Generally, it is not in my place to care about who buys what and when they do but I'm often drawn to the reasons behind each purchase made by prominent persons, companies or institutions, because that matters more.
Since the report on Arthur Hayes's recent ETH purchase does not highlight his reasons, we are going to be looking at the broader appeal of Ether that is drawing personalities like Hayes to buy back in despite recently taking profits.
BitMEX co-founder and Bitcoin billionaire Arthur Hayes has bought back into Ethereum just a week after selling a large tranche.
Onchain data shows that Hayes offloaded 2,373 Ether, worth roughly $8.32 million at the time, when the token was trading near $3,507. The sale, which occurred about a week ago, locked in profits before Ether’s latest rally.
In a reversal, the crypto analyst moved out $10.5 million in USDC across multiple transactions on Saturday, with the stablecoins directed toward purchasing ETH at prices above $4,150, significantly higher than his earlier exit point. – Cointelegraph report
Potentially paying an additional $2 million to acquire a stack recently offload must come with concrete reasoning.
Ethereum has recently been a hot topic. From months of getting shit-talked for losing revenue to L2s and effectively stagnating in price actions despite Bitcoin's growth to now being praised, despite the continued presence of all of those previous weaknesses.
How does something like this happen?
Since July 10, more than 1.035 million ETH, worth roughly $4.17 billion, has been accumulated by a cluster of unknown whales and institutions through exchanges and institutional trading platforms, according to data accumulated by EmberCN.
The surge in buying activity coincided with Ethereum’s strong price rally, climbing from $2,600 to $4,000 within the month, a 45% increase.
Public company Ethereum holdings is currently at 1,749,490 or 1.45% of the asset's circulating supply. This is currently valued at $7.46 billion.
What is interesting about any of this is that there's been some speculation, even before Ethereum's recent price actions, that institutions really just want Ether, with some suggesting that companies like BlackRock are more interested in Ethereum than Bitcoin.
The emphasis is on the plans to tokenize real world assets on Ethereum and dominate the future of financial markets.
I mean, it makes sense that Bitcoin ETFs would be used to entice the public by demonstrating the demand and success of the ecosystem.
Ethereum is the leading smart contracts chain that has evolved (without breaking) in ways not previously thought possible, so it's no surprise that these institutions would want to control a significant piece of the network.
There's been lots of bold predictions lately for the price of Ether, with some forecasting that the asset will be valued at $20,000 at some point. Circling back to Arthur Hayes's recent repurchase, one could argue that it's all part of the bigger FOMO from institutions to stack ETH for the expected growth in tokenized real world assets markets.