That overnight "whale buying ETH like crazy" was not a bull. ZachXBT says it was a thief spending stolen stablecoins. Would you have read that bid as bullish?

What we know (Mon Nov 2):

• ZachXBT flagged a suspected theft of more than 106M USD from exchange accounts of an unnamed EU entity, taken on Sunday Nov 1. Neither the victim nor any exchange has confirmed the loss.

• - An on-chain trace by Bitquery counts about 108.8M USD in USDC leaving three exchange accounts (OKX, Kraken, Crypto.com) from 12:25 UTC Nov 1, about 73.2M of it in the three hours to 23:00 UTC. Bitquery says nothing points to a breach of those exchanges: the withdrawals came from one customer's accounts.

• - From just before midnight UTC, one fresh wallet swapped about 63M USD of USDC and USDT into 27,553 ETH (avg about 2,286) in roughly four hours. Lookonchain had flagged it at 01:17 UTC as whale buying.

• - Part of the funds went through instant exchanges (Kyrrex, WellWallet) and into Monero via Wagyu, and some was bridged to Tron. ZachXBT is highly confident it is NOT Lazarus Group.

• - At 13:47 UTC Bitquery still saw about 78.3M USD on Ethereum in thief-linked addresses, mostly ETH that no issuer can freeze. Only about 3.7M was still in freezable USDC.

The tape (Binance spot, 19:43 UTC, 24h):

• $ETH 2,241 (-0.8%)

• - $BTC 76,779 (-1.3%)

• - $XMR 118.70 (+4.8%)

• Context, not cause. ETH now trades just under the thief's 2,286 average, so that overnight bid has turned into ETH that may get sold as it moves through bridges and swaps.

My take: a big on-chain buy is not a signal until you know where the money came from. Fresh wallet, stablecoins from exchanges, ETH forwarded within hours: that is a laundering pattern, not accumulation. Watch the remaining ETH wallets and whether Circle freezes the USDC left.

Do you check where a whale's funds came from before you follow the trade?

Source: https://tradeassi.com/en/news/bcf00ca3-0876-4f36-ac1f-f9cbb0ae6cf0

Not financial advice. DYOR.