Why Didn’t ETH Dump After Shanghai? Interview With Nansen
Going into the upgrade, Nansen Content Lead Andrew Thurman said he’d predicted that net outflows from Ethereum’s staking contract would be a weeks-long phenomenon. To his surprise, his firm found that withdrawals appeared to have flattened out within a matter of days.
Kraken and Coinbase had the lion's share of principal withdrawals - both stressed by the SEC. However, looking only at the principal is a bit deceptive. A look at Nansen's Shapella dashboard reveals a different story.
Most of the initial withdrawals were from accrued interest, not the capital. Also, most retail investors can't afford the 32 ETH minimum stake, so have been using third party services such as Lido Finance. Also note that the current average staking price is $2,127, and well above the current price. The yield on ETH staking is not spectacular, running at about 3.8% pa. This means that many stakeholders are still running at a loss, and will be hoping to make a profit some day.
This still doesn't wholly explain the lack of a price dump. Well, there was a small dump down to about $1,400, but the slow withdrawal protocol avoided a larger drop, with ETH then rallying to above $2,100 within a month. Interestingly, not quite reaching the average staking price. I assume the "ETH Staked Average Price" is the price at the moment of staking, which may well not be the price at which the ETH was bought.
Anyway, looking at the action in the few days after Shapella, it seemed clear there were serious buyers soaking up whatever was being dumped onto the market. Not a bad profit for those buyers!
not at all manipulated.
still, interesting to see.