Updated December 22, 2025, ETH saw sustained inflows to whale wallets, with 10K–100K-ETH addresses leading. According to Cryptoquant, these wallets collectively hold over 22M ETH, while the largest cohorts carry around 4.47M. Whales accumulated in 2025 at sub-$3,000 levels, offering support near $2,800 and signaling long-term confidence despite weak retail sentiment.

Since August, Ethereum open interest has fallen by about 50%, signaling a substantial deleveraging in the derivatives market and a broad reduction in leveraged risk. ETH is trading close to $3,040 while total liquidations hover around $48.5 million, with shorts contributing roughly $31.8 million and longs about $16.7 million. With leverage significantly reduced and volatility muted, Ethereum appears to be consolidating as traders wait to see how new leverage returns to the market.

According to ChatGPT, Ethereum is favored over Solana for 2026, with the AI model focusing on value capture, institutional alignment, and evolving layer-2 economics rather than raw activity. It highlights maturing rollups, rising blob-space demand, and constrained issuance for ETH, while noting year-to-date prices of $3,040 for ETH (down almost 9%) and $126 for SOL (down 33%) as of press time.

Ripple's Managing Director for the Middle East and Africa, Reece Merrick, has reflected on the five years since the SEC filed its lawsuit against the company on Dec. 22, 2020, saying the experience strengthened the team and his conviction in Ripple's success. He highlighted that 2025 became one of Ripple's most ambitious years, with around $4 billion deployed into the crypto ecosystem, several major acquisitions completed and its RLUSD stablecoin greenlisted by Abu Dhabi's FSRA. Merrick now believes the outlook is brighter than ever for both Ripple and the broader digital asset sector.

According to on-chain data, 11 newly created wallets withdrew about 1.567 million Chainlink, worth roughly $19.8 million, from Binance over the last three days. LINK remains in a corrective phase below key moving averages, while exchange outflows are reducing readily available sell-side supply and may reflect defensive accumulation rather than speculative trading.

Cardano (ADA) is trading around $0.37 after a bearish monthly MACD crossover and has declined 32% since that signal, with analysts monitoring potential support near $0.23. Momentum remains weak below the 9-week EMA at $0.45 and 21-week EMA at $0.66, while futures open interest has slid to about $660 million from above $1 billion earlier this year.

On 22 December 2025, Hyperliquid addressed community concerns over HYPE token selling. According to co‑founder Iliensinc, the wallet behind recent trades belongs to a former employee dismissed in early 2024 and is not tied to the current team. The company also reiterated strict policies barring staff from trading HYPE derivatives.

Hyperliquid said that a wallet its community identified for allegedly shorting HYPE belongs to a former staff member who left in the first quarter of 2024. The co-founder stressed that the person's trades do not represent the firm's ethics and reiterated that employees face strict bans on HYPE derivatives trading and use of material non-public information. HYPE, which launched near a few dollars in November 2024 and later touched about $60, was trading around $25.40, roughly 24% lower over the past year but still up about 290% since inception.