- The month of August caused Ethereum to lose all the gains it had been holding for over a month. The king of alternative cryptocurrencies sharply dropped from the mid $1800 level two weeks ago
- At the time of writing, ETH is trading at $1,659 with a decrease of over 11% in the past 30 days, according to data. The price correction also affected the overall profitability of the network.
- Locked supply in Ethereum’s staking smart contract, unaffected by market fluctuations, continued to reach new highs.
Ethereum price experienced sharp declines in August, but interest in ETH 2.0 staking did not diminish; According to the latest update, over 28 million ETH has been staked on the network.
August is a Challenging Month for Ethereum
The month of August caused Ethereum to lose all the gains it had been holding for over a month. The king of alternative cryptocurrencies sharply dropped from the mid $1800 level two weeks ago and has been fluctuating in the $1600 range since then.
At the time of writing, ETH is trading at $1,659 with a decrease of over 11% in the past 30 days, according to data. The price correction also affected the overall profitability of the network. According to a recent Glassnode update, approximately 55.42% of all ETH addresses were profitable, which is the lowest in the past seven months.
The degree of profitability can also be understood by examining the Net Unrealized Profit/Loss (NUPL) indicator. Essentially, this measures the difference between unrealized profit and unrealized loss and determines whether the network is generally in a profit or loss state.
While a positive value confirms that the network is making a net profit, the level of profitability has decreased significantly. As seen in the graph, NUPL dropped from 0.13 before the price correction to 0.032.
Staking activity continues
Interestingly, the bearish market trend did not affect the excitement of ETH investors. Locked supply in Ethereum’s staking smart contract, unaffected by market fluctuations, continued to reach new highs.
According to the latest update, over 28 million ETH has been staked on the network. This accounts for approximately 23% of Ethereum’s total circulating supply.
The significant increase in staking also demonstrated investor confidence in the mechanism, which was not present before the Shapella update. Since the implementation of the hard fork, the staked supply of ETH has increased by over 50%.
The increase in staking came with a steady increase in overall ETH adoption rate. The number of addresses holding a positive amount of ETH has approached 105 million, indicating strong growth since its inception about eight years ago.
Although not explicitly stated, it can be said that more people are buying ETH for staking purposes rather than trading. This is because ETH trading volumes have been declining in recent months.