Shiba Inu has taken a 3% hit today as a whale has moved a massive SHIB stack worth $28.7 million in the last 24 hours.

Shiba Inu Has Declined Over The Past Day

SHIB had kicked off 2023 on a positive note as the meme coin had been riding an uptrend during the first five days of the year. Today, however, the asset has reversed toward a decline and has already erased almost all the gains of the recent rally.

At the time of writing, Shiba Inu is trading around $0.00000821, down 3% in the last 24 hours. Below is a chart that shows the trend in the crypto’s price over the past five days:

As you can see in the above graph, SHIB had been climbing up until yesterday and stood at around 6% gains for 2023 at that point. Since then, however, the coin has turned around and has been going down instead. Now, Shiba Inu only has 1% profits in year-to-date performance.

In terms of the weekly returns, SHIB investors are currently still 3% better off, but these profits are much lesser than the 7% value seen yesterday, suggesting that the downtrend is wiping away all the progress the coin has made recently. The meme coin’s fiercest rival, Dogecoin, is also only sitting at marginally better gains of about 4% in this period.

Now, why did Shiba Inu lose the upwards momentum and rapidly dropped off in the past day? The movement of whales could provide hints about it.

SHIB Whale Has Transferred 3.3 Trillion Tokens

As per data from the crypto transaction tracker service Whale Alert, a massive Shiba Inu transfer has been recorded on the Ethereum blockchain in the past day. In total, this transaction involved a movement of 3,373,256,285,000 SHIB, which was worth upwards of $28.7 million at the time of the transfer.

Here are the complete details of this transaction:

It would appear that both the sending and the receiving addresses for this transaction were unknown addresses. Such addresses are unattached to any known centralized platform (like an exchange), meaning that they are likely to be personal wallets.

As this transfer involved the movement of a massive amount of coins, the sender is most likely to be a whale. Now, what the whale intended to do with this transaction is unclear, as the receiving end is usually an exchange when selling is the purpose.

However, given that the price went down after this transaction (the same stack of coins is now worth only $27.7 million), the whale might have indeed dumped, and done so through over-the-counter (OTC) means instead.

Nonetheless, one optimistic sign for SHIB holders could perhaps be that the coin has become the most-traded token of the 1.000 largest Ethereum whales in recent hours, according to WhaleStats:

JUST IN: $SHIB @Shibtoken flipped $WETH for MOST TRADED token among top 1000 #ETH whales

Peep the top 100 whales here: https://t.co/jFn1zIOq03

(and hodl $BBW to see data for the top 1000!)#SHIB #WETH #whalestats #babywhale #BBW pic.twitter.com/L2fA1aKFnG

— WhaleStats (tracking crypto whales) (@WhaleStats) January 6, 2023

This renewed interest could be for selling much like the whale from yesterday, but given that this trading activity has come after the price has already been declining, it might be for buying instead.