Fantom ($FTM) has recently flipped the meme-inspired cryptocurrency Shiba Inu ($SHIB) to become the most traded token among the largest 1000 whales on the Ethereum ($ETH) blockchain. SHIB remains, however, a top holding for these whales.
According to data from whale tracking service WhaleStats, Fantom’s $FTM is now the ERC-20 token that has had the “highest number of transactions among the top 1,000 Ethereum wallets” over the last 24 hours.
Fantom is a “high-performance, scalable, and secure smart-contract platform. It is designed to overcome the limitations of previous generation blockchain platforms.” It aims to be faster and cheaper than older blockchains “yet extremely secure.”
Fantom’s token has notably lost around 40% of its value over the last 30 days in a sell-off that was affected by macroeconomic factors including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and rising inflation in most countries, and by a prolific developer, Andre Cronje, announcing his departure from the decentralized finance space.
Some market observers saw the move coming as Cronje had deleted his Twitter account and updated his LinkedIn profile to reflect he was no longer an advisor to the Fantom Foundation before the announcement came. Despite the warning signs, tokens associated with projects Cronje worked on plunged.
Solidly, a hybrid automated market maker (AMM), lost 75% of its value on the announcement while automation platform Keep3r lost 25%. Lending platform Iron Bank lost 50% of its value as well. Yearn.Finance, a blue-chip Defi project in which Cronje was no longer involved in the day-to-day operations, also saw its token tumble shortly after Cronje’s announcement was made.
Fantom itself along with tokens from its ecosystem plunged as well, despite Cronje not being known for significantly being involved in their development.
In a statement shared by the Fantom Foundation on social media, Cronje said that while he decided to move away from the Defi space, the “Fantom team has been honorable throughout my engagement with them” and he believes they are on the “right technology path, and I have no doubts that they will continue to succeed.”
It’s unclear whether the largest Ethereum whales have been trading $FTM in a bid to accumulate the token or to dispose of their holdings in light of Cronje’s announcement. Data from DeFiLlama shows that Fantom’s total value locked plunged from around $12 billion to $6.7 billion over the last few weeks.
While $FTM is currently the most traded token among Ethereum whales, data shows they are still holding onto their meme-inspired SHIB, with the cryptocurrency being their third-largest holdings behind only Ethereum itself and FTX’s native cryptocurrency $FTT.
As CryptoGlobe reported, the top 1,000 whales on ETH held over $2 billion of Shiba Inu late last month and were seemingly still accumulating the meme-inspired cryptocurrency at the time. Their accumulation was occurring after the team behind SHIB announced it tapped Singapore-based blockchain solutions provider Unification, a company that has worked with firms like Google and Amazon, to work on Shibarium.
Shibarium, it’s worth noting, is a layer-two network built on top of the Ethereum blockchain meant to support the Shiba Inu ecosystem. It’s set to enable “rapid low cost transactions optimized for gaming.” Unification is planning on launching a public testnet for the network “very soon” according to its announcement.
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