Massive ETH holders have been accumulating all through late 2024 and into 2025, whilst retail balances decline, information from Nansen reveals.
Despite the fact that Ethereum’s (ETH) worth is down over 44% this 12 months and buying and selling round $1,900, some massive traders are nonetheless including to their holdings, in accordance with on-chain information from Nansen shared with crypto.information.

Ethereum whales’ holdings | Supply: Nansen
Whereas smaller ETH holders have been decreasing their balances, whales holding between 10,000 and 100,000 ETH have elevated their holdings by over 12% in early 2025.
“The 10k-100k section noticed over a 12% progress in 2025 alone on their whole ETH balances whereas the 1k-10k section noticed a 3% improve of their holdings YTD.”
Nansen
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On the similar time, Ethereum’s community exercise appears to have slowed, with median fuel costs reportedly dropping practically 50 occasions since early 2024, whereas a number of the exercise seems to have shifted to Solana (SOL) and layer-2 networks, the report suggests.
Ethereum additionally faces rising competitors, with Nansen saying that the community is “competing on all fronts and dangers being a ‘jack of all trades however grasp of none’ in comparison with BTC, SOL and TIA.”
Regardless of accumulation from some whales, the broader pattern stays unsure as ETH leaves “a lot to be desired throughout lots of the onchain metrics,” Nansen notes, including that the asset has “extreme underperformance on each the way in which up and the way in which down.”
For ETH to reverse its long-term downtrend towards BTC, “important modifications would wish to happen,” analysts at Nansen declare, although it stays unclear whether or not any near-term catalyst might shift market sentiment.
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