Ethereum continued to reel under a broader market sell-off, after losing over 57% of its total value and shedding over 32% in the past 7 days.

As of writing, the second largest crypto asset by market cap is trading at $2,079 after losing the $2,000 support earlier today and has had a 19.98% markdown in the past 24 hours.

Apart from macroeconomic headwinds, the sell-off has been exacerbated by fears over stablecoins, after UST de-pegged earlier this week followed by USDT yesterday.

Be that as it may, the price plunge seems to have stoked Ethereum whales, with the level of on-chain activity shooting up drastically in the past week, before tapping record highs yesterday.

“Ethereum whales have been extremely active today, firing off 2,596 transactions valued at $1M or more. This is the highest day of whale transactions since January, and something to monitor as ETH drops below $2k for the first time since last July.”  Santiment tweeted Thursday.

The surge in transactions was also reported on Curve, a decentralized exchange running on Ethereum. As per a series of tweets by Curve finance, for the third day in a row, the transaction volume on the Ethereum chain exceeded $5.8B, setting a record for the highest single-day transaction volume in history. Further, the cross-chain transaction volume exceeded $6.8B.

The high number of transactions was reflected in the soaring gas fees. As seen on blockchain analytics platform Nansen, the median gas cost of the Ethereum Network rose by more than 550 gwei with the most gas consumption being traced to Uniswap and AAVE lending among other leading contracts.

The data comes even as the ETH/BTC continues to soar, reaching an all-time high this week despite the downward pressure that has been mounted by the UST contagion. The high level of activity is also reflected in Bitcoin, with Santiment reporting that Wednesday saw the biggest level of transaction activity involving unique Bitcoin addresses since February. 

That said, while this level of market activity could mean many other things including traders swapping various assets, one thing remains clear, most of it is buying activity.

According to Carlos Gomez, this type of market activity could signal the market is almost making a u-turn.

“Generally it means that a large accumulation event by whales took place and that could signal that the bottom is not too far ahead” Gomez tweeted Thursday.