The researcher’s analysis of the blockchain showed that after FTX’s collapse, there was a significant outflow of Ethereum and stablecoins from centralized exchanges.
Sandra Leow, a Nansen research analyst, post a thread on Twitter in which she is delving into the current state of decentralize finance (DeFi), with a particular focus on how ETH and stablecoins are moving from exchanges.
As things stand, the deposit contract for Ethereum 2.0 contains over 15 million ETH, while the contract for Wrapped Ether (wETH) holds around 4 million. Jump Trading is a web3 infrastructure development and investment firm that holds over 2 million ETH tokens. It is the third largest holder of Ethereum in the ecosystem.
The largest Ethereum balances are in Binance, Kraken, Bitfinex and Gemini wallets, while a significant amount is also in the Arbitrum layer-2 roll-up bridge.
The amount of Ethereum in smart contracts is increasing, which shows that more ETH is for DeFi products. This means that there are lots of different places where you can trade cryptocurrencies, put your money into cryptocurrency “savings accounts” to earn more money, and store your cryptocurrency securely.
The recent collapse of FTX may have also led to fears for users holding assets with third-party custodians, like centralized exchanges. These exchanges hold users’ assets in centralized storage, which means that if the exchange were to collapse, users could lose their assets. Leow highlight the reality that the safety of funds holding on exchanges may not be guaranteed:
They had to get rid of some of their tokens because they were victim to the fallout from the FTX exchange. In the last week, we’ve seen Jump Trading taking money out of accounts on different exchanges. They’ve taken out ETH, BUSD, USDC, USDT, SNX, HFT, CHZ, CVX and other types of tokens.
There has been a large amount of ETH that has they withdrawn from major exchanges in the past week. The value of ETH that left Gemini was $829 million, while the value of ETH that left Upbit was $797 million. Many people are withdrawing their ETH from Coinbase and Bitfinex. Over $500 million worth of Ethereum was withdrawn from each platform.
A lot of stablecoins are moving off exchanges last week. Money moved out of Gemini and Bitfinex. A lot of people are withdrawing their stablecoins from KuCoin and Coinbase. KuCoin had $138 million worth of stablecoins withdrawn, and Coinbase had $108 million worth of stablecoins withdrawn.
Nansen’s role in delivering key insights into major ecosystem events in 2022 is significant. The blockchain analytics firm investigated on-chain data to determine the cause of Terra’s collapse in May 2022.
It then conducted a thorough investigation into FTX’s collapse, with evidence suggesting collusion between the exchange and crypto trading firm Alameda Research. Sam Bankman-Fried did create and own both of the companies.
