The current Ether (ETH) market is not the same as that of 2018, according to Ki Young Ju. Market data showed a huge outflow taking place on Coinbase in 2021. On February 18, 2021, ETH hit a fresh all-time high and reached near $2,000 as trading momentum returned to the market.
Data acquired from Tradingview showed ETH/USD coming to within $70 of the $2,000 psychological level. After spending most of this month trading sideways with modest upward momentum, the second-biggest crypto reawakened earlier this week. At the time of publication, daily gains totaled nearly 5% with Ether recording new all-time highs of $1,930.
One analyst projected a possible breakout to $2,200 if the bulls manage to surpass the $2K mark. As a result of the long time spent just below that zone, nonetheless, these levels needed to hold as support to avoid any steep declines. The analyst mentioned:
“However, once again, quite a tricky breakout, so you have to watch that zone… at $1,820.”
If these supports fail, Ether may easily drop back to the $1,400 level. The correction is not entirely reliant on the ETH community since the crypto has not yet decoupled from bitcoin. Hence, if bitcoin sees a massive correction from near its all-time highs, ETH and the general crypto market will follow the downside move.
Based on previous reports, Ether’s gains have outperformed bitcoin in 2021. ETH has year-to-date gains of 164% compared to bitcoin’s 85%.
Sellers Fail To Capitalize
In the meantime, data that was discovered this week highlights some long-closed events, which may have underpinned ETH’s meteoric surge. Ki Young Ju, CEO of on-chain analytics service CryptoQuant, published some withdrawal figures for Coinbase showing three huge tranches of about 200,000 ETH exiting the crypto exchange for private wallets last year.
Based on the publication by Ki, the exits could have come in the form of big volume investors closing over-the-counter (OTC) deals which could be similar to what was previously observed with Bitcoin. He wrote comments and published a chart showing the transactions:
“There were three consecutive massive $ETH outflows from Coinbase cold wallets last year. Speculative guess but those might be OTC deals for institutional investors like $BTC Coinbase outflows.”
Ki added that it may be worth setting various alerts to monitor similar behavior if this is a trigger for price performance. In a further tweet on February 18, he said:
“$ETH all-time high in 2021 is different from 2018. Fewer deposits, more withdrawals across all exchanges. Selling pressure significantly weaker than in 2018.”
