ETH Price Nears $2,800 as FTX Estate Sends $75M in Ether to Wintermute

Decoding the Movements

Arriving in a big bunch, the FTX and Alameda Research liquidation team transferred 27,372 ETH, worth roughly $75.32 million, to Wintermute across six wallets, according to onchain analyst EmberCN.

Other trackers caught pieces of the same operation, with lookonchain flagging a 23,639 ETH deposit valued at $65.05 million. It has not been confirmed whether the tokens were sold, but what the transfer has established is intent and capacity.

Why Route It Through a Market Maker?

Wintermute is an over-the-counter (OTC) desk, and estates are known to use desks because they do not want to move price against themselves. Dumping $75 million of ether into open order books would print on every chart and invite front-running. Handing it to a market maker lets the position bleed out across days, in sizes the book absorbs.

The trade-off is that the estate gives up some upside for execution certainty, and creditors have complained about exactly that trade before. Bitcoin.com News has previously reported on this, especially when FTX netted $1.9 billion selling solana at $64 per SOL, a discount that drew creditor scrutiny. Estate sales are structured for certainty, not for maximizing the last dollar.

Selling Into a Rebound

Ether is trading near $2,750 as of today, up 1% on the day and 15% across the week (while boasting a market cap north of $338 billion). Bitcoin’s price, on the other hand, has run 14% over the same stretch. An estate that spent much of the year selling into weakness now has a materially better bid to sell into.

That improved bid is showing up in demand elsewhere onchain as one over-the-counter whale accumulated 15,000 ETH worth $41.26 million on the same day, lifting a position built since July to 52,000 ETH.

What It Means for Creditors

Since the whole FTX liquidation debacle a few years ago, the now defunct exchange’s Recovery Trust has completed five distribution rounds totaling roughly $11 billion. The fourth paid out about $2.2 billion on March 31, while the fifth one released roughly $900 million on July 3.

The estate has been converting holdings steadily to feed that pipeline. In fact, Bitcoin.com News has tracked Alameda moving $16 million in solana tied to repayments, wallets shifting $8.6 million to Binance, and an earlier $5 billion hitting wallets.

Not every estate decision has aged well, though, with FTX selling Alameda’s Cursor stake for just $200,000, a position now valued far higher.

The open question ahead is whether ether supply of this size keeps arriving while the market rallies because a single $75 million tranche is absorbable at current volumes. However, a pattern of such sales could become a potential ceiling. Interesting couple of weeks ahead!