Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, has seen a surge in demand and price since February's start, touching a one-month high of $2,687 in early trading today.
According to Lookonchain, an Ethereum whale has made a brave move in accumulating ETH since the start of February, when its price started rising from lows of $2,239.
The whale's strategy was going long on ETH using revolving loans on the Spark platform, which allows the borrower to withdraw, refund and redraw funds as needed within a specific limit and period.
Spark is a platform that provides revolving loans. Users can deposit ETH or other ERC-20 tokens as collateral and borrow stablecoins like USDC or DAI at a variable interest rate.
According to Lookonchain, the aforementioned whale has withdrawn 39,900 ETH worth $99.5 million from exchanges like Binance, Bybit, OKEx and Bitfinex since Feb. 1 at an average price of $2,492, and borrowed 56.8 million DAI from Spark.
The whale's goal is clearly to increase their ETH holdings and profits while paying little interest on the loans.
Whale's bullish stance is evident
The above-mentioned strategy may seem risky given the volatility of the crypto market; however, the whale's bullish stance is evident.
By all indications, the whale is essentially betting that the price of ETH will rise more than the interest rate of the loans and that the collateral value will not fall below the liquidation threshold. If the price of ETH falls significantly, the whale may lose their collateral and suffer a substantial loss.
Tomiwabold OlajideOn Monday, the Ethereum ecosystem and layer-2 tokens such as LDO, ARB and MNT soared after Franklin Templeton filed for a spot Ethereum ETF.
Growth in alternative cryptocurrencies, or "altcoins," appears to have accompanied Bitcoin's surge, which reached $50,000 for the first time since late 2021. At the time of writing, ETH was up 8% in the last 24 hours to $2,678.
Valeria Blokhina
Yuri Molchan
Dan Burgin
Alex Dovbnya