Shiba Inu’s demand among ETH whales soars, will it help traders in 2023?

• SHIB whales continue to accumulate but retail participation is low.
• Investors are not in a celebratory mood yet.

Shiba Inu [SHIB] was one of the superstars of the crypto world in 2021 after achieving robust growth. Fast forward to the present and it is now drawn down by slightly over 90% from its historic ATH.

Its current price level is within a critical range and here’s why you might want to pay a bit more attention to it.

Read Shiba Inu’s [SHIB] price prediction 2023-2024

SHIB has been stuck within the same price range after mid-December and it continued to slip further down this week. This downside performance brings it closer to an important support level. The last time that the price was within this range was at the bottom of the June crash.

Source: TradingView

Is it possible that this same level might act as another bounce-off range? It would not be surprising since most cryptocurrencies tend to bounce off from key support levels. Such an outcome has a high probability for SHIB in the next few days. More so if we consider a recent Whalestats alert.

Whalestats confirmed that Shiba Inu joined the list of the top 10 most traded tokens among the 100 biggest ETH whales. This is confirmation that there is still demand for SHIB, especially at its current support range.

JUST IN: $SHIB @Shibtoken now on top 10 purchased tokens among 2000 biggest #ETH whales in the last 24hrs ?

Peep the top 100 whales here: https://t.co/R19lKnPlsK

(and hodl $BBW to see data for the top 2000!)#SHIB #whalestats #babywhale #BBW pic.twitter.com/ERo2CK30RN

— WhaleStats (tracking crypto whales) (@WhaleStats) December 29, 2022

How many SHIBs can you get for $1?

Whale demand has been building up

An evaluation of SHIB’s supply distribution reveals that most of the large address categories have been increasing their balances. This means top whales have been buying the dip.

Source: Santiment

But a closer look at the current demand levels reveals that there is low retail participation. For example, transaction volume remained within the normal range if not lower at least in the last week of December 2022. This may indicate a lack of sizable participation by the retail market.

Source: Santiment

Perhaps the reason for low retail participation is that the weighted sentiment tanked from 23 December to 27 December. However, it bounced back significantly in the last two days, confirming that investors are shifting towards a bullish outlook.

Should we expect the bulls to take over at support?

Source: Santiment

So far the whale activity seems to have curtailed the bearish momentum, especially in the last 24 hours at press time.

The price managed to rally by at least 2%. But not much upside is expected especially if there is not enough whale participation and liquidity for a sizable bounce.

The 90-day MVRV ratio achieved a slight bounce, indicating that recent buyers near the current lows are already in profit.