Despite the southbound direction of the general cryptocurrency market, it now appears that the Ethereum whales have taken a renewed interest in Shiba Inu, the dog-themed memecoin.
Shiba Inu, or SHIB has become one of the top ten holdings of these Ethereum whales, alongside tokens like Chainlink, Cardano, and Polygon.
A week before, the memecoin was far from being in the top ten or even the top 20 holdings of the Ethereum whales. At the time of writing, Shiba Inu is now in fifth place, only coming behind other coins and stablecoins like Ethereum itself, USDT, USDC, and stETH.
In the heat of the crypto winter, right before mid-2022, the Ethereum whales entered a phase of rigorous Shiba Inu selling. First, their combined holdings fell below the $1 billion mark before going under $500 million and finally passing below the $100 million mark.
In October, the whales' combined Shiba Inu holdings fell under $80 million and began consolidating to around $70 million. Earlier in the week, their comprised portfolio contained over $70 million worth of SHIB.
However, according to a tweet from Etherscan, the Ethereum whales have started accumulating the memecoin again.
Over the last 24 hours, the Ethereum whales transferred massive amounts of Shiba Inu to 760 billion SHIB in two separate tranches. These two transfers have launched Shiba Inu right back up, helping it reclaim its place among the top 10 Ethereum whale holdings.
The largest of these transactions, worth 419,497,861,322 SHIB, was from Binance, as the exchange transferred massive amounts of these coins between its own wallets. This Binance transfer was likely a result of the proof of reserves procedure the CEX is currently engaged in to prove that Binance has not been tampering with customer funds before or after the FTX bankruptcy issue.
The second transaction, however, was the odd one. According to Etherscan data, this transaction containing 339,397,509,444 SHIB was moved between two anonymous wallets, with the transaction emptying the original sender's wallet.
This suspicious movement of Shiba Inu by the Ethereum whales now starts to beg the question.
At the time of writing, SHIB is in a bearish trend that closely resembles that of the general crypto market. SHIB traded between the $0.00000898 and $0.00000939 zones, trying to find its footing before the bears pushed it lower.
SHIB needs to maintain above $0.000009 for its bulls to hold on to whatever control they have left. If the memecoin slips below this level, it may slip further down to the $0.0000083 support if the bulls cannot defend the $0.000009 zone. And if the bulls fail to defend $0.0000083 again, the memecoin may drop further to $0.00000715.
In more interesting news, a machine learning model may have a few predictions about where the price of Shiba Inu may be headed.
The machine learning-based model at PricePredictions, which utilizes a set of technical indicators like Moving Averages, Bollinger bands, and RSI movements has come up with something to say about what comes next for the memecoin over the rest of the year.
According to the model's predictions, the memecoin is likely to rise by almost 9% and trade at $0.00001 or somewhere close on 31 December 2022.
The model's prediction is also interesting because it resembles the general CoinMarketCap consensus about where Shiba Inu may be headed over the rest of the year.
Members of the CoinMarketCap forums have predicted that Shiba Inu may be headed towards $0.000011 over the rest of the year.
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