• Ethereum (ETH) has witnessed some selling pressure over the weekend as it struggles to hold past $1,800. On the downside, $1680 is crucial support for the crypto.
• Over the last week, Ethereum whale addresses have been buying a good quantity of ETH ahead of the Shanghai upgrade.

After a strong move to $1,800 last week, the world’s second-largest crypto Ethereum (ETH) has struggled to keep up with the rise and hold this level. Over the weekend, ETH faced some selling pressure. As of press time, Ethereum (ETH) is trading 1.88% down at a price of $1,756 with a market cap of $214 billion.

More or less, Ethereum seems to have entered a kind of consolidation just ahead of the Shanghai upgrade scheduled next month in April. On the technical chart, $1680 represents the top of a symmetrical triangle dating back to September 2021.

As the ETH price has already moved past this, it would serve as strong support for the altcoin going ahead. Thus, it will be important for the bulls to defend the $1680 level thereby preventing any further fall in the ETH price.

Another reason behind the selling pressure on Ethereum is the recent report by Bank of America that predicts that there will be a drop in ETH usage if the speed of the Ethereum network doesn’t pick up soon.

The Ethereum blockchain underwent the Merge upgrade last year in mid-September 2022 to improve the network scalability and performance. However, the analyst at Bank of America states that the speed of the Ethereum blockchain hasn’t increased considerably and is due for an upgrade if it wants to retain its position among the top two cryptocurrencies by market cap.

Ethereum Whales Back In Action

Although the ETH price has come under some selling pressure, on-chain data shows that the Ethereum whales have been scooping up large supplies of ETH recently as the Shanghai upgrade draws closer. The Shanghai upgrade is important since it would unlock all the staked ETH allowing users to withdraw their coins from staking at their discretion.

As per the data from Santiment, Ethereum wallet addresses holding between 1,000 and more than 10,000 ETH as well the wallet addresses holding between 1 million to 10 million ETH tokens have been adding the ETH cryptocurrency to their kitty consistently over the past week. This clearly shows that the large wallet addresses are majorly bullish on the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.

In addition to the Ethereum whales, the retail players have also been accumulating ETH consistently. The total number of Ethereum addresses with at least 0.01 ETH has now shot up to 23.3 million with the address count hitting an eight-month high as per the data on Glassnode.

At the same time, the total value locked (TVL) in the ETH 2.0 deposit contract has also touched a new all-time high above 17 million ETH. This is a bull-case scenario for ETH.

Although, ETH has made strong advancements this year, it has struggled to keep pace with the Bitcoin gains.