The short version
- Arthur Hayes ENA sale: the second 14 million ENA, about $2.73 million, left his wallet at 00:00 UTC on Sunday, finishing a 28 million ENA exit worth about $5.49 million.
- The Ethena price is up 5% since, at $0.2057, because the blocks went to Binance and a trading firm and were small next to the $478 million of ENA traded in 24 hours.
- The crew is watching $0.2260 above and $0.1941 below, plus the Fed decision on October 28 and the 40.6 million ENA unlock on November 2.
The Arthur Hayes ENA sale is done, and the token went up anyway. The second 14 million ENA left his wallet 47 seconds after midnight UTC on Sunday, at $0.1955, and the Ethena price has risen 5% since, to $0.2057 at the time of writing. Over the past 24 hours ENA is up 6.9%.
That second batch was worth about $2.73 million and finished what Hayes started on Saturday, when he told his followers he had “dumped it all”. So who took 28 million tokens off one of crypto’s best-known Ethena backers without the price breaking, and has selling ENA worked for him before?
Lookonchain flagged the second sale less than three hours after it happened:
Arthur Hayes(@CryptoHayes) dumped another 14M $ENA ($2.73M) 2 hours ago.
Over the past 24 hours, he has sold $28.8M worth of tokens, making $6.65M in profit.
Most of his profits came from $ETH and $ENA, while he roughly broke even on $UNI, $ETHFI, $AERO, $PENDLE, and $ZAMA.
How Big Was the Arthur Hayes ENA Sale?
Arthur Hayes sold 28 million ENA in two equal lots, worth about $5.49 million in total. The wallet Arkham labels as his sent the first 14 million at 05:38 UTC on Saturday, October 24, with ENA at $0.1968, to a Binance deposit address. The second 14 million went at 00:00 UTC on Sunday, at $0.1955, to an address Arkham tags, with a question mark, as Cumberland DRW, the trading firm.
It was planned. A test transfer of 1 ENA went to that same address on Saturday morning, 18 hours before the big one.
He hadn’t held it long. About 28.5 million ENA came into the wallet between August 1 and 10, when ENA traded between $0.079 and $0.098. Lookonchain puts his average cost at $0.089, which makes the sale a profit of roughly $3 million, more than double his money in under three months. The wallet still holds 451,672 ENA, about $93,000.
Hayes gave the reason himself on Saturday: “It looks a bit dicey out there in macro and geopolitical land.” ENA was one line in a $28.8 million clear-out that also took in ETH, UNI and ETHFI, so the sale says more about his view of the market than about Ethena.
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Why Didn’t ENA Fall When Hayes Sold?
Because 28 million ENA is small next to the market that took it. It is 0.2% of the 13.4 billion ENA in circulation, and the second lot’s $2.73 million is about 0.6% of the $478 million of ENA that changed hands in the past 24 hours, by CoinGecko’s count.
Route matters too. Coins sold to a trading firm in one block don’t hit the order book at once. The desk pays a price agreed off-exchange and sells or hedges over hours or days, so nobody watching the chart sees a 14-million-token sell order.
ENA did wobble. It slid to $0.1887 by 09:00 UTC on Sunday, 3.5% under the sale price. Then buyers took over in the afternoon: ENA climbed from $0.1946 at 14:00 UTC to $0.2077 by 18:00 UTC and hit $0.2126 on Monday morning, 8.7% above where Hayes sold. Traders pointed to Ethena’s dollar token, USDe, going live on OKX’s X Layer network, which we covered in Ethena Price Turns Green in a Red Market.
There is also a story the market can live with. Hayes isn’t an insider dumping a token he has lost faith in. Ethena’s own genesis story credits his 2023 essay “Dust on Crust” with the idea behind USDe, and he has traded ENA in and out of this wallet for a year.
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Has Selling ENA Worked for Arthur Hayes Before?
Mostly, yes. In three of the last four big moves in this wallet, ENA went the way Hayes traded it over the next month. The one miss was a costly one:
Read the second and third rows together. Hayes took in 15.8 million ENA between late November and New Year’s Eve, when the price was falling from $0.29 to $0.20, and sent the same amount out in early February at $0.12 to $0.14. That round trip lost money. The August buy near the bottom more than made up for it.
So two days of green don’t prove him wrong. His exits in November and February were both followed by lower prices within a month, and this time he is betting the whole market has to “go down to go up”.
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Ethena Price Analysis: Can ENA Keep Climbing Without Hayes?
It can, if it gets through $0.2260. That was the October 21 high, and ENA turned lower from $0.2126 this morning, well short of it. Below, the 50-day EMA at $0.1969 and the $0.1941 support from October 8 sit just under the price Hayes sold at, so his exit level is now the line buyers need to defend.
Two dates are close. The Fed decides on rates on Wednesday, October 28, at 18:00 UTC (2:00 p.m. in Washington), the macro test Hayes stepped aside for. And on Monday, November 2, 40.6 million ENA unlock for the Ethena Foundation, according to Tokenomist, more than Hayes sold in both lots together.
The levels the crew is watching:
- Bull case: a daily close above $0.2260 opens the way to $0.2474, the October 12 high.
- Base case: ENA holds between $0.1941 and $0.2260 through the Fed decision and the November 2 unlock.
- Bear case: a daily close under $0.1941 loses the 50-day EMA and Hayes’ sale price, with $0.1744, the October 18 low, next.
The Arthur Hayes ENA exit barely moved the market. Whether that makes him early or wrong will show in November, the same window in which his last two exits paid off.
In crypto since 2017. A technical trader with years of experience in DeFi and onchain data.
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