Just now, on-chain monitoring detected an important signal — a compliant institution’s custody channel has been continuously absorbing over 54,000 ETH within two minutes, amounting to approximately $148 million at current prices.

The timing was between 16:16 and 16:18, with three nearly simultaneous transfers:

The first transfer sent 14,714 ETH from an address starting with 0xA66e, roughly worth $49 million; immediately following, an address starting with 0x1755 transferred in 14,644 ETH, valued at nearly $48.76 million; the largest transfer came from an address starting with 0xc583, directly depositing 24,792 ETH, exceeding $82 million in a single transaction.

All three wallets are anonymous addresses, and the funds flowed into institutional-grade custody services — these channels are typically not accessible to retail investors and are more commonly used for large off-market transactions, institutional cash-outs, or market maker rebalancing.

Honestly, this move doesn’t look very friendly. Such a large accumulation of ETH in a short period is hard not to associate with potential sell-offs next. Especially since the movement is through institutional channels rather than on-chain protocols, effectively ruling out staking or DeFi deployment possibilities.

Of course, there are other explanations — for example, an institution might be hedging or simply rebalancing assets. But frankly, in the current market environment, this kind of inflow more resembles a warning sign of upcoming selling pressure.

In short, we need to closely monitor ETH’s price action in the near term, especially if this $148 million worth of tokens begins to be released, likely leading to increased volatility.