Grayscale Buys 10,000 ETH During Ethereum’s Recovery Above $1600, Transaction Fee Spike Above $37

During the crypto market crash earlier on Tuesday, February 23, Ethereum (ETH) price tanked all the way to $1450 levels. ETH has recovered since then and is now back above $1600 levels. At press time, ETH is trading at a price of $1618 with a market cap of $185 billion.

It turns out that on its way to recovery, the Grayscale Ethereum Trust (ETHE) added an additional 10,000 ETH coins to its kitty in the last 24-hours, as per data on Bybt. Thus, just like Bitcoin (BTC), institutional inflows into Ethereum continue as big players make the most of the market dip. With the recent purchase, Grayscale’s total ETH holdings have gone above 3.17 million.

The Ethereum price rally has been big so far in 2021. Although ETH has corrected 20% from its all-time high above $2000, it is still trading at 125% gains year-to-date. Interestingly, data from Skew analytics points out that there are fewer liquidations during the recent ETH price recovery which shows that some long-term investors have already done the bottom fishing.

Less liquidations on the way up pic.twitter.com/gHFh5cxHAM

— skew (@skewdotcom) February 24, 2021

Another data shows that CME Ether Futures see huge investor interest since going live two weeks back on February 8. Earlier on Monday amid the crypto market jitters, the CME Ether futures registered record trading volume close to $160 million.

CME ether futures logged a record volume day yesterday on new crypto market jitters pic.twitter.com/lsapnEw7mn

— skew (@skewdotcom) February 23, 2021

ETH Transaction Fee Hits All-time High

One of the major concerns that the Ethereum network is currently facing is that the surge in the Ethereum network activity has led to a major surge in the gas fee. Over the last year, the DeFi growth has exploded leading to massive settlements on the Ethereum blockchain. Data from CoinMetrics show that the daily settlements on Ethereum have jumped 25x over the last year.

In one year, Ethereum has grown from settling ~$373m per day to over $9b per day. pic.twitter.com/LVqCwMVlsr

— Documenting Ethereum (@DocumentEther) February 25, 2021

However, just as ETH enters a consolidation zone between $1500-$1700, the average transaction fee on Ethereum has spiked to a whopping $37.6 billion. Thus, the ETH transaction fee has hit the highest since its inception in 2014.

#Ethereum's fees are something to keep a close eye on as market prices teeter in the $1,500-$1,700 range after its swift retrace from Friday's $2,041 #ATH. Average $ETH fees peaked at $37.60 yesterday, its highest level in the token's ~6 year history. https://t.co/YaXPWnqr1a pic.twitter.com/hQX7CLNH2U

— Santiment (@santimentfeed) February 24, 2021

The Ethereum network congestion has given a lot of fodder to players like the Binance Smart Chain. Recently BSC has registered a major uptick in DeFi activity and DEX transaction thereby helping its naive BNB cryptocurrency to become the third-largest crypto by market cap.

Although Ethereum makes an attempt to surge past $2000, the technicals look weak at this point.

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