Hostilities in the Middle East and Donald Trump's suspicious change of attitude towards the conflict create unease in the markets. This leads to a sharp new downturn in cryptocurrency prices this Tuesday. Despite this, Ethereum whales are doing their best to improve the currency's performance in the spot market.
According to recent reports from Glassnode, staking of this token has significantly increased over the last few days. Sending coins to the staking lock has a bullish effect similar to sending Bitcoin to unknown wallets.
According to the cited portal, for almost a week, the daily accumulation of ETH by large wallets has exceeded 800,000 tokens. According to CryptoQuant, staking of this currency has also reached a significant magnitude. In that sense, the total ETH in staking hit new all-time highs.
Data suggests this is the fastest accumulation rate by Ethereum whales since 2017. Staking wallets now control 27% of the total ETH supply, representing a huge driver for the currency's scarcity in the market. The result could be an increase in the token's price.
Ethereum whales push upwards
Despite the movements by large ETH wallets being predominantly bullish, the price of the coin is declining. In recent moments, the token is experiencing a performance of -6.2% in 24 hours, which extends to -9.6% on the one-week chart of CoinMarketCap.
These red numbers are directly related to the new crash in the cryptocurrency market this Tuesday. During this day, the President of the United States intensified his rhetoric against Iran. From a stance of neutrality, Donald Trump now adopts an aggressive discourse in which he called for the unconditional surrender of Iran in a message on Truth Social.
Subsequently, the U.S. President stated that he knows the location of the Iranian religious leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, whom he described as an 'easy target'. As if that weren't enough, Trump emphasized that his patience is running out and he is seriously considering attacking Iran.
This change in posture by the United States becomes one of the scenarios that could lead to an escalation of the conflict. As expected, the markets reacted with panic. Both stocks and cryptocurrencies are experiencing an aggressive massive sell-off at the time of writing this note.
Thus, the geopolitical situation momentarily halts the expected rally that could be triggered by whales in the price of Ethereum.