Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum has really made substantial gains in 2020, up 75% YTD compared to BTC’s 25%. Even after the March sell-off, Ether has been on an incline, rising 10.52% against BTC the past month. Currently, ETH/USD is trading at $226.
Just like the price, the number of non-zero addresses has been surging, but at a faster pace. Today, Ethereum non-zero addresses broke the previous ATH set just a day back to make a new high of 42,385,447, as per Glassnode.
These addresses have been growing since 2017, notwithstanding the price movement, which went through a bull market in 2017, a bear market in 2018, and now a mix of gains and losses before starting a new bull rally.
Just like retail investors, miners are busy accumulating ETH. In the past 20 days alone, they added 21,000 ETH, worth nearly $5 million, shared Spencer Noon, head of DTCCapital, a crypto-native investment fund.
This latest uptrend came after miners sold ETH in late May and then in early June following the digital asset’s price spiking above $220, “which coincided with the start of Ethereum’s consolidation phase.”
“The prolonged periods of miner accumulation can indicate fairly high confidence levels among ETH mining pools in relation to the asset’s short-term performance,” noted Noon.
A similar uptrend can be seen in the number of addresses interacting with ETH each day, which is being sent or received. In an uptrend for the past three months, it is now approaching the 2019 top.
Such a surge in Ethereum’s daily active addresses has previously coincided with a “strong price rally.” But because currently, Ether is in the weeks-long consolidation period, this may be a decoupling of price action from the network’s utilization.
But at the same time, previously dormant coins are once again moving between addresses as Ethereum’s token Age Consumed spiked at its highest level since February 2019. The spike is also higher than the one recorded on Black Thursday.
“Spikes in Token Age Consumed can sometimes signal changes in the behavior of certain long-term holders, and tend to precede increased volatility in the coin’s price action,” noted Santiment. This latest spike however is most likely due to the sudden movement of 789,534 $ETH (~$184,000,000) from the PlusToken Ponzi scheme.
Ethereum’s token velocity has also hit a 2-year high with the average amount of times active ETH tokens changed addresses spiking to 5.2 per day which might be prompted by the “yield hunting” on various DeFi protocols.
Lastly, as we have been reported, total gas used on the Ethereum blockchain made a new all-time high just as Ethereum miners are voting to increase the block gas limit by 25%. This growth is also due to an increase in the utility of DeFi projects Uniswap and Kyber network, which also ranks in the top 10 by gas usage in the past month.