15,000 ETH in Two Weeks: Accumulation Continues While Miners Keep HODLing

Recent data indicates that Ethereum miners prefer holding their mined coins and have increased their balance in the past few weeks. At the same time, the number of ETH addresses containing from 100,000 to 1,000,000 coins have jumped by nearly 5% in June alone.

Ethereum Miners HODL

Because of the current proof-of-work consensus algorithm that Ethereum employs, the network relies on miners to use their time and processing power to solve cryptographically difficult puzzles. If successful, miners add blocks to the Ethereum blockchain, which happens every 15 seconds on average.

In return for their efforts, miners receive rewards paid in ETH and fees associated with any confirmed transaction, which are sent to their linked Ethereum wallets.

Since mining requires the usage of powerful devices that use lots of electricity, miners have specific costs. Typically, they sell portions of the rewards they receive to cover those costs.

Lately, however, ETH miners have been keeping most of their coins instead of selling them, according to data from the monitoring company Santiment. It reads that “Ethereum miners have collectively increased their balance by 15,000 ETH throughout the past couple of weeks.”

Holdings of Ethereum Miners And ETH Whales. Source: Santiment

Unusually High Fees Connected?

It’s worth noting that two particularly abnormal Ethereum transactions took place with extremely high fees during June. Both of them, transmitting value of 0.55 ETH and 350 ETH respectively, had to pay the same fee of 10,668 ETH (worth about $2.6 million at the time).

Ultimately, it turned out that the victim was a small South Korean P2P exchange called Good Cycle. After waiting for days for the sender to get in touch, both mining pools that received the fees decided to allocate them among their respective miners.

It’s unclear at the moment if these unusually high fees were included somehow in the data from above and if they impact the increased balance of ETH miners.

Ethereum Whales On The Rise

The graph from Santiment also illustrates another increase for Ethereum holders. More precisely, it outlined that the number of ETH addresses containing between 100k and 1 million coins has “surged by nearly 5% since the beginning of the month.”

Other ETH addresses have been spiking lately as well. Wallets with at least 0.1 ETH recently registered a fresh all-time high by surpassing the three million mark. Since the start of 2020, the number of these addresses has increased by nearly 11%.

Additionally, non-zero ETH addresses had skyrocketed by 350% since January 2018. It’s worth noting that, in this period, the asset price has plunged by 85%, but investor interest has increased.

By adding essential Ethereum developments to the data from above, a recent analysis concluded that the ETH price has been “significantly undervalued” for a while.