Over the past few days, as the highly anticipated Shibarium launch faced setbacks, a total of $131.57 million was transferred by whale addresses in 29 transactions, each involving at least $1 million.
These significant movements in the Shiba Inu (SHIB) ecosystem have captured attention amid the protocol’s challenges.
Data reveals that these transactions occurred starting on August 16, just before the official launch of Shibarium.
This information was collected on August 18, a day after reports of the protocol’s failure, which left more than 1,000 ETH of Shibarium users locked in the bridge contract.
This event raised concerns about fund safety and the project’s future, making the recent whale movements even more pertinent.
The whales involved in these transactions moved a total of 15.34 trillion SHIB, which constitutes about 2.6% of the entire supply of 589.35 trillion SHIB tokens.
Considering the SHIB token’s price during each transaction, a combined value of $131.57 million was transferred, averaging about $4.53 million per transaction across the 29 identified whale transactions.
Of notable significance is that all 29 transactions did not involve withdrawals from centralized exchange (CEX) addresses to unknown addresses.
Such withdrawals often indicate a sale or a purchase. Instead, these transactions represented a diverse range of activities, including deposits, internal transfers within exchanges, and transfers between unknown addresses that are challenging to decipher.
Interestingly, the data also highlighted transactions involving two known institutional investor addresses: Cumberland (“0xad6…d8862”) and Wintermute Trading (“0xdbf…dc080”). The transactions involving these addresses were as follows:
- Cumberland to Unknown: 200.87 billion SHIB ($1.71 million)
- Unknown to Wintermute: 330.57 billion SHIB ($2.81 million)
- Wintermute to Binance: 150 billion SHIB ($1.27 million)
Among the known whales in the SHIB ecosystem, the largest known whale address is owned by the cryptocurrency exchange Crypto.com (“0xf3B…302A3”), which holds 43.73 trillion SHIB, equivalent to approximately $371.31 million.
