The activity of Ethereum whales has not shown any clear trend in the last seven days, although there is high volatility, meaning whales are very much in action. In a recent analysis, no dominant buying or selling bias was seen despite the high activity.
One question that needs to be answered is whether the whales are moving their wealth into stablecoins or whether the reverse is the case. This will give us an idea of the dominant sentiment among large buyers who hold a significant portion of the market value.
We analyzed data sourced from Dune Analytics for USDT and USDC, the top two stablecoins, on decentralized exchanges (DEXs) for the last seven days and found that there is only a slight difference favoring stablecoins against Ethereum.
However, something more interesting could be going on, as USDC is also clearly preferred over USDT. We dug deeper to uncover the reason for this preference.
Whales Show Slight Bias Toward Stablecoins Against Ethereum
Just like there is no significant bias toward buying or selling of ETH on DEXs as revealed by the last study, whales seem to be buying a little more stablecoins than ETH. ETH to stablecoin transactions had a volume of $184 million, while stablecoin to ETH had $170 million. This shows a difference of roughly $14 million in favor of stablecoins.
However, the relatively small imbalance suggests cautious positioning rather than a decisive exit from ETH. A significant difference in volume would have suggested that large buyers are exiting ETH, which would raise concerns about a potential worsening of the bearish trend, but that is not the case at the moment.
Large buyers show slight bias towards stablecoins. Source: Dune.com | Analysis by author
Large Buyers Prefer USDC Over USDT
The data further revealed that large buyers are not just slightly flowing into stablecoins, but they prefer USDC by a wide margin. Of the roughly $162 million stablecoin volume traded over the last seven days, over $120 million was in USDC, while USDT only accounted for about $41 million.
Two scenarios are possible here. The first is that large buyers genuinely prefer USDC to USDT for different reasons ranging from security to fees. Secondly, the data may be showing pseudo bias toward USDC because most DEXs offered trades in USDC more than USDT, but that seems to be the case.
Large buyers prefer USDC over USDT. Source: Dune.com | Analysis by author
We analyzed the trading volume by trading platforms to see how the two stablecoins performed on platforms offering both options. Interestingly, Uniswap was the leading platform of choice, accounting for $135 million in volume (over 83%) of the total of $162 million, and offers both USDC and USDT.
USDC still outperformed USDT, accounting for over 77% of the Uniswap-bound stablecoin volume, worth over $104 million. This shows that large traders truly prefer USDC over USDT, which only had a little over $30 million in volume.
USDC volumes are significantly higher on Uniswap. Source: Dune.com | Analysis by author
Conclusion
Large buyers showing bias toward USDC could be for a number of reasons. First, it could be that USDC has deeper liquidity than USDT. This allows large traders to execute large trades running into millions with as little slippage as possible, which can save them thousands of dollars.
USDC is also commonly used as a dollar-denominated asset throughout DeFi, which is seeing significant growth, resulting in the higher volume relative to USDT.
In conclusion, large buyers are not exiting ETH. The difference in flow direction is marginal, suggesting cautious positioning rather than an outright bearish bias, despite ETH's price decline. This is good news for retail traders, especially as we already established that the decline is not linked to whale activity.
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