Whale flips from spot ETH into $748M of crypto longs
An address tracked as an $11 billion Bitcoin whale sold around $330 million worth of Ether on December 30, then opened $748 million in new long positions across Bitcoin, Ether and Solana, according to on-chain analyst Lookonchain’s latest post and transaction data highlighted by Cointelegraph. Ether traded near $2,940 at press time while Bitcoin hovered just under $88,000 and Solana sat around $124, based on spot prices from CoinGecko and CoinMarketCap.
The largest of the new bets is an Ether long worth about $598 million, opened at $3,147 with a liquidation level at $2,143, per figures Lookonchain shared on X. That single position would start blowing through margin if ETH slid roughly 27% from current prices or about 32% below the whale’s entry, giving traders a clear downside line to watch.
Lookonchain estimated that the trio of fresh longs already carries roughly $49 million in unrealized losses, a drawdown the whale has kept open rather than cutting. That choice turns the account into a live gauge of how much pain large players will tolerate on directional bets into year end.
The address that keeps rewriting the ETH trade
This is not a one-off punt. The same address surfaced in August when it sold about $2.59 billion in BTC to acquire $2.2 billion in spot ETH and a $577 million Ether perpetual position, all in a handful of transactions, according to Lookonchain traces summarized in August by Cointelegraph. Days later the whale closed $450 million of that ETH long, locking in roughly $33 million in profit before buying another $108 million of spot ETH.
By September 1 the address held 886,371 ETH worth more than $4 billion, briefly overtaking SharpLink Gaming as the second-largest known corporate Ether treasury, per Lookonchain and Nansen analysis cited in a follow-up report from Cointelegraph. On-chain intelligence firm Arkham later noted that even after rotating more than $5 billion into ETH, the whale still controlled over $5 billion in BTC in its primary wallet as of early October, in coverage of a $360 million BTC transfer into DeFi protocol Hyperunit’s hot wallet that same month.
Then the trader flipped. On October 10 the address opened roughly $900 million of shorts across BTC and ETH, including a $600 million Bitcoin short at 8x and more than $300 million in Ether shorts, with one $330 million ETH short at 12x, according to positions tracked by Onchain Lens and Lookonchain and reported by Cointelegraph. That sequence effectively front-ran a multi-billion-dollar October drawdown that erased roughly $19 billion from crypto markets, a call many traders now treat as a key reference point when this address moves.
Nansen shows whales buying ETH while “smart money” stays short
The latest rotation lands against a split positioning backdrop. On the spot side, large wallets have quietly increased their ETH exposure. Over the past week, whale addresses boosted their Ether buying pace by 1.6x and accumulated about $7.43 million worth of ETH across 19 wallets, according to flows tracked on Nansen’s Token God Mode and relayed in the same Cointelegraph report.
“Whale demand for Ether points to a kind of natural rotation into ETH and altcoins with more upside,” Nansen research analyst Nicolai Sondergaard told Cointelegraph back in September.
Yet Nansen’s Smart Money dashboard paints a very different picture on perps. The platform shows its best-performing traders net short about $121 million notional in ETH, $192 million in BTC and $74 million in SOL on Hyperliquid, even as the $11 billion whale leans long on all three, per numbers cited in the same December 30 Cointelegraph piece.
That sets up a rare face-off. On one side a single address willing to size into hundreds of millions of long exposure after correctly leaning short into October’s break. On the other a basket of systematically profitable accounts still pressing short risk into year end.
What market desks are watching
The immediate focal point is Ether’s path between $3,000 and the whale’s $2,143 liquidation mark. A clean break lower would turn the new ETH long into a multi-hundred-million-dollar forced seller and likely spill over into BTC and SOL books through cross-margin effects. A grind higher would squeeze Nansen’s aggregated shorts on Hyperliquid and validate the whale’s latest pivot.
Traders now monitor three data feeds in parallel: the whale’s address on Lookonchain, Nansen’s Smart Money net positioning and live order book behavior on major spot venues where ETH still trades just below $3,000. The tape will decide which side was early and which side was wrong.
