Big Wallets Are Buying This Dip — But One Coin Says the Pain Isn’t Over Yet
Whale data shows quiet buying in Bitcoin, Ether and XRP, but only ETH holders remain underwater — and that's the number to watch.
If you’ve watched Bitcoin, Ether and XRP slide this year and wondered whether the big money is panicking or buying, on-chain data suggests it’s mostly the latter. Large holders — the “whales” whose moves often hint at where a market is heading — have kept adding to their stacks through the downturn, according to fresh figures from analytics firm CryptoQuant reported by CoinDesk. But one of the three majors still tells a much shakier story for the people holding it.
That coin is Ether. As of Thursday, ETH traded around $1,900 — well below the roughly $2,450 average price that all current holders paid for their coins, a figure known as the “realized price.” When the market price sits under that number, it means the average holder is sitting on an unrealized loss. Bitcoin and XRP, by contrast, are both still comfortably above their realized prices, with Bitcoin trading about 17% above its $52,900 average cost and XRP hovering near $1.10 against a realized price of roughly $0.75.
What “whales buying the dip” actually looks like
For XRP holders, the headline number is simple: the token has fallen from about $2.40 in January to somewhere between $1.00 and $1.20 now. Yet CryptoQuant’s data shows average spot order sizes have stayed in “big-whale” territory the entire time, meaning large buyers never stepped away even as the price dropped by more than half.
Crucially, the firm describes this as “quiet absorption” rather than a breakout in the making. A separate indicator — the 90-day taker cumulative volume delta, which tracks whether buyers or sellers are more aggressive in trades — has cooled from strongly buyer-driven earlier in the year to roughly neutral now. In plain terms: whales are soaking up supply, but there isn’t yet the kind of aggressive buying pressure that typically fuels a sharp rally.
Bitcoin’s whale cohort tells a similar patience story. Excluding exchange and mining-pool wallets, large Bitcoin holders bottomed out near 2.87 million BTC in December 2025 and have since rebuilt to about 3.06 million, buying most aggressively when the price dipped below $60,000 in June. Even so, that’s still roughly 170,000 BTC short of the 3.23 million held at the 2025 bull-market peak — a reminder that the rebuilding is real, but not yet complete.
Why Ether’s whale picture is more complicated
Ether’s holder base isn’t moving as one unit. Wallets holding between 10,000 and 100,000 ETH have swelled from about 14 million ETH in mid-2025 to a record near 19.6 million now — a clear sign of accumulation among mid-sized whales. The very largest wallets, those holding over 100,000 ETH, also grew, climbing from around 2.6 million ETH in mid-2025 to about 4.6 million by May 2026, an increase CryptoQuant pegs at roughly 1.8 million ETH.
But the 1,000-to-10,000 ETH cohort has gone the opposite way, shrinking from a January 2026 peak of about 15.6 million ETH down to roughly 12.9 million. That suggests some mid-tier holders have been distributing coins even as bigger and smaller players accumulate — a split that makes Ether’s on-chain story less clean-cut than Bitcoin’s or XRP’s.
Why this matters if you’re holding any of these three
For everyday holders, the realized price gap is the number worth remembering. It’s essentially the market’s average “cost basis” — and when the price sits below it, as Ether’s does now, historical patterns suggest that phase often marks late-stage capitulation rather than the start of a new leg down. CryptoQuant noted Ether bottomed in early 2025 at a similarly compressed level relative to its lower price band, which is part of why the firm is watching this metric closely as a potential turning-point signal.
That said, CryptoQuant was careful not to call a bottom outright, warning the broader market could still see one more leg lower before a durable floor forms. Whale accumulation is a useful clue about sentiment among large players, but it isn’t a guarantee of an imminent rally — it simply shows that the people with the deepest pockets aren’t rushing for the exits.
Read more: Bitcoin Is Flashing the Same Warning Signs It Did Right Before Its Last Big Rally
