Cumberland Consolidates ETH Holdings, Institutional Interest Grows

Cumberland, a prominent cryptocurrency trading firm, recently withdrew 62,381 ETH from centralized exchanges (CEXs) and deposited it into Coinbase Prime, a move that suggests a strategic consolidation of ETH holdings by institutional players. This significant transfer, valued at approximately $174 million, was executed over a two-day period and monitored by lookonchain.

This action by Cumberland comes amidst growing institutional interest in Ethereum, which has been gaining traction as a foundational layer for decentralized finance (DeFi) applications. As market dynamics shift, such actions by large entities could influence ETH's price stabilization and overall market sentiment.

In a separate development, centralized exchanges registered a net outflow of over 17,000 BTC, worth more than $1.6 billion at the going market price of $98,600, according to Glassnode data shared by Andrew Dragosch, head of research at Bitwise. This is the biggest single-day exodus of coins since April 2024.

Investors typically take direct custody of coins when planning to hold them for the long term. Hence, a large outflow of coins from exchanges is taken to represent bullish sentiment. Coinbase alone processed net withdrawals of over 15,000 BTC, per Dragosch. Analysis by Timechainindex.com shows Coinbase on Wednesday split four addresses totaling over 20K BTC into 60 addresses, which hints at a possible major purchase by ETFs or MicroStrategy this week.

On-chain data compiled by CryptoQuants shows that all crypto exchanges had a cumulative negative netflow of 47K BTC on Wednesday, with 15.8K of that being attributed to Coinbase. Bitcoin fell below $96,800 during Wednesday's late U.S. trading hours only to turn higher early today after Eric Trump, the son of President Donald Trump, encouraged the family-linked crypto platform World Liberty Financial to make its first bitcoin investment.