Yesterday it was discovered that the Ethereum Foundation is withdrawing more than 17,000 ETH from staking.
The total value of the ETH withdrawn is about 48.9 million dollars.
The question being asked is: will those 17,000 ETH, once withdrawn, be sold?
Summary
The withdrawal from staking
Technically the Ethereum Foundation has deposited more than 17,000 WSTETH into the Lido unstETH contract. This means that, once the unlocking process is completed, they will receive in return an equal amount of ETH.
When you stake ETH on Lido you receive in return an equivalent number of WSTETH tokens. Precisely because of this, staking on Lido is defined as “liquid”.
To withdraw ETH from Lido staking it is enough to return the WSTETH tokens received at the time of the staking deposit, and you get back an equal amount of ETH.
This procedure is used to withdraw ETH from staking, and in general it is done when you intend to spend, sell or use the ETH.
Staking should be considered a form of holding, therefore the unlocking of ETH from staking should be considered a force that interrupts holding.
In fact, the hypothesis circulating is that these 17,000 withdrawn ETH could be put up for sale.
The impact on the price of ETH
As of today 17,000 ETH have a market value of about 39 and a half million dollars, so this is not exactly an insignificant amount.
The problem is that this is the first withdrawal of ETH from staking by the Ethereum Foundation, also because the foundation’s large-scale staking program only started a few months ago (in February of this year).
Since there are no precedents, it is not possible to accurately imagine what might happen to the price of Ethereum with this sale, even if the market does not seem to be very worried.
The news in fact came out several hours ago, and the markets have priced it in only with a drop in the price of ETH from just under $2,400 to just over $2,300. In other words, the drop in recent hours has been only 3%, but since yesterday there had been an unjustified small rise, ETH has basically done nothing but return to where it was yesterday.
Note that from February until last week the Ethereum Foundation had staked more than 69,000 ETH, so it has withdrawn just under a quarter of them.
Initially, in February, it had staked only 2,016 ETH, followed by another 22,517 ETH in March and more than 45,000 ETH at the beginning of April.
However, since the sale of the 17,000 ETH withdrawn in recent days has not yet taken place, the impact on the price has not yet occurred.
The performance of ETH
According to CoinMarketCap data, the daily trading volume of ETH in these days exceeds 15 billion dollars, therefore the impact of a sale of about 49 million dollars should in theory be easily absorbed.
It is no coincidence that after this news came out the price simply returned to where it started yesterday before the rise to $2,400.
Note that in reality the rise had started as early as March 30, that is almost four weeks ago, when it surpassed $2,000.
Since then it continued until April 17, when it reached $2,464, and then began a period of lateralization that is still ongoing.
Indeed, to tell the truth the lateralization seems to have started on April 14, when it fell from $2,415 to $2,304, so much so that since then the price has continued to oscillate between just over $2,400 and just over $2,250.
Technically what is underway is a brief downward lateralization, but after two weeks of rising a small downward lateralization is physiological.
Forecasts
At the moment, as usual, many forecasts are circulating regarding the future trend of the price of Ethereum, but there does not seem to be a widespread consensus among analysts.
Right now the uncertainty is such that slightly pessimistic forecasts, which see it falling back below $2,000, alternate with very optimistic forecasts that even see it heading towards new highs.
Moreover, it seems that the recent price trend of Ethereum is closely linked to that of Bitcoin, while the latter depends to a large extent on macro events, over which at the moment uncertainty reigns supreme.
In such a scenario it is practically impossible to identify clear signals of a rise or a fall.
