Jump Trading’s crypto vertical Jump Crypto unstaked and sold another 11,501 ETH worth $29 million, leaving it with another $63 million to sell. Out of the $63 million, it has already unstaked $48 million of ETH in preparations to sell.
The market maker was heavily called out for unstaking and moving its ETH to exchanges over the past weekend as crypto prices dropped tremendously due to macroeconomic factors. Such large amounts sold by those with significant holdings add tremendous selling pressure on crypto assets like ETH, forcing holders across the market to liquidate their assets. This further caused the asset’s price to drop, which is what happened to ETH as its value dropped over 20% on early Monday morning.
Crypto analysts expected ETH’s price to spike as ETFs of the coin went live in late July. However, the asset’s price failed to take off, which many believe was due to Jump Trading offloading its ETH reserves continuously, which started a day after the ETFs began trading on US exchanges. It now looks like ETH may still face some pressure with the market maker still selling its ETH.
Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain posted about Jump Trading going at it again, “Jump Trading started selling $ETH again!” It added, “Jump Trading currently has 21,394 $wstETH ($63.6M) left.” The wstETH tokens represent Jump Trading’s staked ETH in the Lido Finance liquidity staking protocol.
QCP Capital noted in a report earlier this week that Jump Trading’s selling action alongside other market makers’ actions was more consequential in the overall crypto market cap tanking than assumed. “The immediate trigger in crypto seems to have been aggressive ETH selling from Jump Trading and Paradigm VC. The move was probably exacerbated by market makers scrambling to cut short gamma as front-end ETH volumes spiked more than 30% to 120%!”
