Over the past 16 hours, popular crypto tracking service Whale Alert detected several transactions, carrying astounding amounts of Ethereum.
In the meantime, eight hours ago, the second-largest cryptocurrency, ETH, spiked to hit a new historic high of $4,400. The previous all-time high was reached by the coin in May, also above the $4,000 level—$4,379.62.
Whales shift over $1 billion in ETH as coin hits ATH
Nine transfers carried 250,964 Ethers, which totaled $1.118 billion in fiat, when Ethereum hit its $4,400 lifetime price peak.
The largest transaction bore 51,837 ETH ($224,934,548). The other transfers carried from 20,000 to 40,000 Ethers.
The transactions were mainly made by anonymous whales, but some of those ETH lumps were sent by leading crypto exchanges Binance, Gemini and Bithumb.
At press time, the 250,964 Ethers transferred are worth $1,093,691,073.44 as ETH has slid down a little.
Ethereum's ATH reached after largest ETH circulation day
According to a tweet posted by popular analytics data vendor Santiment, one of the reasons for Ethereum hitting a new all-time high of $4,400 is a whopping large token circulation output day—1.74 million ETH seen on Tuesday.
Santiment analysts believe that it created a bullish divergence. Overall, onchain metric data seem pretty healthy for Ethereum at the moment.
At press time, the second-biggest currency is priced at $4,345 with a market cap standing at $513,329,110,323.
Other reasons for ETH's recent ATH
Overall, Ethereum has greatly outpaced Bitcoin this year, staging a 6x increase, while both retail and institutional investors showed a rising interest in ETH.
Besides, the Ethereum network was boosted by a recent major upgrade, Altair. This upgrade was designed to increase the speed of operations on the network and make it consume less energy.
Vladislav Sopov
Tomiwabold Olajide
Denys Serhiichuk