An unknown whale has just made a significant move on the Ethereum (ETH) chain. On-chain analytics platform Lookonchain spotted the transaction and reported that the whale, simply identified by the wallet address “0x97BD,” moved 10,000 ETH.
Ethereum whale’s long-term confidence
The whale withdrew this large volume of Ethereum valued at $31.91 million from the Bitget exchange. The whale action is significant as it implies strategic accumulation despite ETH shedding over 10% in the last 30 days due to price fluctuations.
Notably, after the whale’s withdrawal, its total wallet holdings soared to 34,188 ETH, valued at about $108.8 million. The whale likely decided to withdraw from Bitget exchange into a private wallet because he intends to keep the asset long term.
Whale 0x97BD withdrew another 10,000 $ETH($31.91M) from #Bitget 2 hours ago, and currently holds 34,188 $ETH($108.8M).https://t.co/44wNrGrIeH pic.twitter.com/KQaPsaaDvf
— Lookonchain (@lookonchain) December 4, 2025
Generally, when a holder is unwilling to sell their asset, they store it in a private wallet. The whale could have decided to store his assets in a self-custody wallet and build up the portfolio. The large volume of Ethereum in the wallet suggests that he has been building it over time.
Lookonchain data shows that the whale has staked the Ethereum through Lido staking. This further emphasizes that the whale has confidence in the future price outlook of Ethereum despite price volatility across major crypto assets on the market.
Ethereum has risen in the last 24 hours from a low of $3,059.98 to hit a high of $3,238.56 during the course of trading.
As of press time, Ethereum exchanged hands at $3,164.88, which represented a 2.02% increase within the time frame.
However, trading volume remains down by 8.44% to $28.03 billion. This suggests that market participants are still cautious and possibly monitoring developments on the chain. It was likely triggered by the $135 million worth of ETH offloaded by BlackRock despite the resurgence of the asset in the previous trading session.
Network disruptions and Buterin’s update roadmap
In the early hours of Thursday, some community members experienced network disruptions.
According to the Ethereum Foundation update, there was a challenge with Prysm consensus clients on the mainnet. The bug caused about 23% of the network nodes to go offline.
Meanwhile, Ethereum Founder Vitalik Buterin has hinted at three crucial updates that the blockchain will need to perform.
Buterin highlighted these to include a cap on the number of contract code bytes that are accessed per transaction and changes to memory pieces. The other is ZK-EVM prover cycle bounds.
