The bear market tendency goes on despite recent spikes in popular tokens value

Bitcoin closed its last week’s candle at its highest level since mid-June, following a volatile weekend during which traders almost managed to break the $25,000 resistance level a few times. The weekend’s bitcoin run started around the $24,000 level, and peaked at nearly $25,000 on Sunday, with a low of $24,238 near the end of the day on Saturday, according to various data. However, all of the weekend’s gains were destroyed in just a matter of hours on Monday, with the most popular cryptocurrency – bitcoin currently trading at around $24,000 again.

At the same time, following last week’s news about a successful merge on another Ethereum testnet, and after the project’s team announced more details regarding the upcoming merge on the Ethereum mainnet, the second largest cryptocoin, by market cap, has maintained its growth in value and is currently trading at around $1,900. Ethereum managed to break the $2,000 resistance level more than a few times during the weekend, more or less in-sync with bitcoin’s movement, and just like it is in decline since the beginning of the day on Monday.

Other popular tokens also changed green and red candles similar to bitcoin’s pace during the weekend, and are trading low since the start of the new week. Monero even announced a new security upgrade, that had been anticipated by its community for months, yet that didn’t manage to take it out of the negative Monday trading pattern.

A curious move was noticed by blockchain data observers today, an Ethereum “whale” wallet that participated in the Genesis ICO of the project by obtaining 150,000 ETH tokens in 2014 was activated on Sunday, after being dormant for three years. The last time the wallet was activated was in July 2019, when a 5,000 ETH transaction to the Bitfinex3 exchange was made, worth just over a million dollars at the time. Yesterday the account made a batch of transactions to multiple wallets, transferring the total amount of 145,000 ETH it was holding.

The funds are estimated to be worth over $280 million at current prices, and naturally attracted the crypto community’s attention with many users noting this could be a possible dump before the much-anticipated Ethereum merge from PoW to PoS. At the same time, others were quick to notice that the whale had mostly sent funds to unknown wallets and not to exchange accounts, and a $280 million selling pressure isn’t considered to be a significant amount of funds, capable of initiating a market dump. Some even assumed the whale account might be about to stake their ETH to become a validator on the network to generate income from its holdings.