Retail interest for Ethereum has been growing gradually in the past several weeks, at least judging by the new record levels of smaller addresses holding ETH portions.
Additionally, the total value locked in the ETH 2.0 Deposit Contract has also reached a fresh ATH of over $6.2 billion worth of the token.
The Ethereum network, the underlying technology behind some of the most booming crypto fields lately – NFT and DeFi – has enjoyed a gradual increase in activity since the middle of 2020.
Somewhat expectedly, ETH investors have grown accordingly as well, reveals data from the analytics resource – Glassnode. The number of non-zero Ethereum addresses started its remarkable ascend in 2018. In the following years, it has expanded from less than ten million to the latest record of over 55 million such wallets.
Additionally, addresses holding at least 0.1 ETH (worth about $170 at the time of this writing) have also gone for a fresh record of roughly 4,3 million. The most evident growth of such wallets came in late 2017/early 2018 when they exploded from one to three million in a matter of weeks – approximately at the time when ETH approached its previous price ATH at $1,430.
And while retail ETH holders have been accumulating lately, larger wallets (considered whales) holding at least 1,000 coins in a single address have been selling off since the start of 2020. The number has decreased by approximately 1,000 and has reached a new 3-year low of 6,547 such addresses.
Investors’ appetite for the upcoming launch of Ethereum 2.0 has also been growing lately. Although the final product is perhaps years away from seeing the light of day, the total value locked in the ETH 2.0 Deposit Contract also reached a new ATH of 3,532,066 tokens.
With today’s price of ETH trading around $1,750, this amount is roughly $6.2 billion. This means that it has increased by about $1 billion since mid-February when the ETH staked on the 2.0 blockchain was just a little over three million.
The active validators have also grown in the same timeframe from 84,000 to over 110,000, according to beaconcha.in data.
