• The data from Santiment and Staking Rewards suggests that the number of long-term stakers for Ethereum has decreased by 31% in the past 10 weeks.
• Despite this, retail investors are showing increased interest in ETH, indicated by a 7-month high in the number of addresses holding more than 0.01 coins.
• Whale investors have also been buying into ETH, which may be beneficial in the short term but could lead to price volatility if they decide to sell off their holdings.
Declining Interest From Long-Term Stakers
According to Santiment, holdings of Ethereum’s long-term stakers have fallen by 31% over the last 10 weeks. In fact, the data suggests that most of the assets of these stakers are currently undervalued. This can be underlined by the declining realized value of ETH 2.o stakers. Despite having low returns, stakers have continued to show interest in ETH.
Retail Investors Showing Increased Interest
Data from Staking Rewards indicated that the number of stakers on the Ethereum network have continued to rise. Over the past month, the number of stakers on the network increased by 6.14%. At press time, there were 544,248 addresses staking ETH. Not only stakers, but retail investors also demonstrated their interest in Ethereum. According to Glassnode’s data, the number of addresses holding more than 0.01 coins rose materially over the past few months. As staker and retail interest begins to rise and the Shanghai Upgrade inches closer, many traders are starting to place bets on Ethereum’s future. The same was evidenced by rising Open Interest in Ethereum on BitMEX, with the same hitting a 4-month high of $76,153,778.12 at the time of writing.
Bearish Sentiment Among Traders
However traders‘ sentiment against Ethereum has started to turn bearish according to Coinglass’s data which indicates that 54% all positions taken against Ethereum are short positions as opposed to long ones recently taken out on other assets such as Bitcoin (BTC).
Whale Investors Buying Into ETH
Despite this bearish sentiment from traders whale investors continue pour money into Eth pushing up its market capitalization when measured against other crypto currencies such as Bitcoin (BTC). New addresses however did not share this enthusiasm with whales as evidenced by declining network growth numbers suggesting fewer new people entering cryptocurrency markets with eth being bought for first time .
Conclusion
With multiple moving factors at play only time will tell how things play out for Ethereum in terms or price movements and overall popularity among investors both institutional and retail alike .