Ether drops as whale moves 73k ETH to Binance

Ether (ETH) traded weak early Monday amid reports of large cryptocurrency transfers to Binance.

The native token of Ethereum's blockchain fell nearly 4% to $1,170, CoinDesk data show.

A whale address moved 73,224 ETH, worth $85.67 million, to Binance during the Asian hours, according to an analysis by on-chain researcher Lookonchain.

Investors typically transfer coins to centralized exchanges when intending to sell or use the coins as a margin in derivatives trading. Therefore, an uptick in exchange inflows often paves the way for heightened price volatility.

"Watch out for the selling pressure of ETH," Lookonchain tweeted, after noting the large inflow into Binance.

According to Lookonchain, the address that moved over 73,000 ETH to Binance was the one that pulled out 84,131 ETH from the decentralized exchange Curve's staked ether (stETH)-ether liquidity pool last week.

The price of liquid-staking protocol Lido's staked-ether (stETH) token fell to 0.97 ETH after the whale withdrew over 84,000 ETH from the Curve pool. At press time, stETH traded at 0.982 relative to ether, per Dune Analytics.