ENS: Did they take advantage of V's speech to raise the price for selling?

Author: Mia, ChainCatcher

Editor: Marco, ChainCatcher

On January 12, news about the interactions between ENS on-chain and exchanges has been emerging continuously. At noon, according to data monitoring by on-chain analyst ai_9684xtpa, it is suspected that the ENS project team/investors are conducting a sell-off.

It is reported that the address 0x1b9…b578f has received a total of 403,000 tokens transferred from the project team's cold wallet over the past year, of which 21,000 tokens were recharged into Binance five hours ago, and currently, all tokens have been gradually flowing into the trading platform. Subsequently, Spot On Chain further disclosed on social media that they monitored that Brantly Millegan, the former operations director of ENS, deposited 199,000 ENS (4.57 million USD) into Coinbase about 16 hours ago, and currently still holds 465,000 ENS (10 million USD) in locked tokens.

As news of a large number of tokens being transferred from wallets to exchanges broke, rumors began circulating in the crypto community that "ENS will run away under the cover of Vitalik," leading to panic among investors. According to market data, after peaking at 24.9 USD on January 11 at 21:00, ENS has shown a downward trend, with the latest price at 21.1 USD, a daily drop of 3.35%.

Vitalik Buterin retweeted the layer2 data analysis plan of ENS on January 3 on the X platform, stating: "All L2s should run on the CCIP resolver so that ENS subdomains can be registered, updated, and read directly on L2. ENS is very important; it needs to be affordable."

Among them, Vitalik specifically mentioned ENS and regarded it as the most successful non-financial application on Ethereum. This tweet pushed ENS into the spotlight, and the crypto community began to see this as Vitalik's clear endorsement of ENS, which led to a surge in token prices driven by the celebrity effect.

According to Binance data, since the tweet was published on January 3, ENS has risen from 8 USD to 21.1 USD, with a peak price of 24.9 USD, marking a maximum increase of 311%. As the token price continues to rise, the FOMO sentiment among investors is becoming increasingly strong.

Large Token Transfers Raise Concerns

Just as the entire ENS community was immersed in the joy of the token price potentially "shining again," the large-scale on-chain token transfers poured cold water on community members. Even more surprising is that the owner of the address is none other than the ENS official, which undoubtedly dealt a heavy blow to investors' confidence. Following this, rumors of "ENS will run away under the cover of Vitalik" began to spread, and currently, the ENS official has not responded to this action.

Looking back, in terms of ENS's functionality and utility, as Vitalik said, it is indeed the most successful non-financial application on Ethereum. Moreover, ENS can provide a user-friendly experience for blockchain after mass adoption, aligning with the goal of expanding the broader web3 user base in the future for layer2.

To judge that such a well-known project is about to run away based solely on large on-chain transfers seems rather hasty. Additionally, the current market shows that the "runaway" rumors have not caused serious panic or sell-offs, which is enough to prove that investors' faith still exists. So what does ENS's action really mean? Perhaps the project team will have new proposals, or there may be some internal conflicts within the official team? Currently, the vast majority of investors in the market remain in a wait-and-see attitude. What the answer is, we can only wait for the official response.