Earlier this Tuesday, the price of Ethereum (ETH) rose above the $3,200 mark, CoinGecko data shows.
According to analytics firm Santiment, this growth can be attributed to shark wallets that hold between 1,000 and 10,000 ETH (roughly $3.2–32 million at current prices).
This group of influential investors has been steadily accumulating ETH.
As noted by Santiment, these wallets have been the “key alpha” for the second-largest altcoin throughout this year.
The network has added 190,000 new wallets in a day is a large spike, which shows strong demand.
Fusaka upgrade
The most recent price spike has coincided with the launch of the Fusaka upgrade, which is Ethereum's latest major network hard fork.
Co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently took to the X social media network to congratulate Ethereum researchers and developers.
"Big congrats to the Ethereum researchers and core devs who worked hard for years to make this happen," Buterin said on X.
The upgrade was successfully activated on mainnet on Dec. It combines two upgrades: "Fulu" (the consensus layer named after a variable star in the constellation of Cassiopeia) and "Osaka" (the execution layer named after the city hosting Devcon 2025).
This is Ethereum's second big upgrade of 2025, following Pectra in May.
Fusaka focuses on scaling data availability for Layer 2 (L2) rollups (e.g., Arbitrum, Optimism, Base) while keeping node operation affordable and decentralized.
Fusaka primarily benefits L2 ecosystems: more data capacity means cheaper and faster transactions on rollups.
Dan Burgin
Vladislav Sopov
U.Today Editorial Team