Is the bull market a signal or a trap for accumulation? Let’s see what the whales have to say.

In recent days, Ethereum has broken through $3,600, and on-chain monitoring has detected some heavyweight players using 25x leverage to go long on ETH, with single positions starting at several million dollars. At the same time, whale investors have been aggressively buying up 280,000 ETH over the past five days, with this buy order costing nearly $1 billion.

Having been in the crypto market for many years, I’ve seen quite a few waves. When these kinds of signals appear, they often indicate that the market is about to change. But the question is, is this the beginning of a new rally, or a carefully laid trap?

**Smart money is placing bets**

In early December, three well-performing whales opened long positions totaling 136,433 ETH, worth about $426 million. These are not trivial numbers; their historical performance is well documented, with one of them already having an unrealized profit of over $105 million.

The most interesting is the "rolling position whale," who started with $125,000 in capital and, through high leverage, amplified their position to over $300 million. Even though recent funds have seen some pullback, this guy is still not giving up, adding $92,000 in margin and opening a new long position of $2.297 million with 25x leverage.

This indicates that leading investors are heavily betting on Ethereum’s short-term trend. On the other hand, high leverage is like a sword without a guard. Recently, there have been forced liquidations of up to $4.7 billion in a single trade. Even a slight price correction could trigger chain reactions of liquidations, spreading the risk further.