Ethereum Sees Biggest Exchange Withdrawals This Year

Over 180,000 Ethereum (ETH) tokens have been pulled out from centralized exchanges in the last 24 hours, as traders seek to preserve their cryptocurrency in expectation of bullish price action.

According to a March 18 tweet from crypto market analysis site IntoTheBlock, more than $500 million worth of Ethereum was withdrawn on March 16 across a number of different CEXs (including Binance, Kraken, and Crypto.com).

Given that the price of one ETH was $2,590.40 on the date of the analysis, the value of the tokens withdrawn was more than half a billion dollars, the highest withdrawal of the year.

Ethereum Outflows A Bullish Sign

According to the company, this figure reflects the greatest aggregated exchange withdrawal of ETH since October of this year. At the time, total ETH withdrawals coincided with a 16% increase in the cryptocurrency’s price during a ten-day period.

Ethereum is the second-largest cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization, behind Bitcoin.

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It is a decentralized computing platform capable of running a broad range of applications, including a plethora of decentralized finance (or DeFi) apps and services.

On the Ethereum blockchain, everything from financial tools and games to complicated databases is already functioning.

And its future possibilities are only constrained by developers’ ideas. As the Ethereum Foundation, a non-profit organization, puts it:

“Ethereum is more than just a payment system. It’s a marketplace for financial services, games, and applications that cannot steal your data or censor you.”

Ether investors are having a difficult time in 2022, with ETH down 25% year to date as of March 17.

Nonetheless, the cryptocurrency has recovered many times in the last couple of months near $2,500, indicating a strong support level. Since then, ETH has risen to $2,934 as of March 19.

ETH total market cap at $351.68 billion on the daily chart | Source: TradingView.com

Blockchain To Proof Of Work

Tim Beiko, developer of the Kiln testnet — formerly Ethereum 2.0 — reported on March 15 that the Ethereum “Merge” had been successfully completed.

The procedure entails separating Ethereum’s Execution Layer from the existing proof-of-work layer and combining it with the Beacon Chain’s Consensus Layer.

The ultimate objective is to convert the blockchain to a proof-of-stake network.

Meanwhile, ETH has increased by 18% over the last week, making it the only top-10 cryptocurrency by market cap to notch double-digit percentage gains, aside from Avalanche (AVAX).

Ethereum Market Cap Swells

The announcement of Ether’s largest outflow came just one day after Finbold reported on Ethereum’s market capitalization increasing by more than $20 billion in a week.

As of Saturday, the market cap of the second biggest crypto was $350.65 billion, CoinMarketCap data show.

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Featured image from nippon.com, chart from TradingView.com